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      Shauneille Perry Ryder, Pioneering Theater Director, Dies at 92

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      As a Black woman, she blazed a path Off Broadway with an intuitive grasp of “how a story should be told, particularly a Black story,” Giancarlo Esposito said.Shauneille Perry Ryder, an actress, playwright and educator who was one of the first Black women to direct plays Off Broadway, most notably for the New Federal Theater, died on June 9 at her home in New Rochelle, N.Y. She was 92.Her daughter Lorraine Ryder confirmed the death.Ms. Perry Ryder, who was known professionally as Shauneille (pronounced shaw-NELL) Perry, directed 17 plays at the New Federal Theater from 1971 to 2006, each a part of the company’s mission to integrate artists of color and women into mainstream American theater. The theater, founded in 1970 by Woodie King Jr. in Lower Manhattan and now housed on West 42nd Street, has been a mecca for Black actors and directors.“She was personable with actors, but she put her foot down,” Mr. King said in a phone interview, referring to her attention to detail. “I’m so glad she worked with New Federal. She gave us a great reputation. In our first 10 years, we had a hit each year, and at least three or four were directed by Shauneille Perry.”In 1982, she directed Rob Penny’s “Who Loves the Dancer,” about a young Black man (played by Giancarlo Esposito) growing up in 1950s Philadelphia who dreams of becoming a dancer but who is trapped by his mother’s expectations, his environment and racism.In The New York Times, the critic Mel Gussow wrote that the play “has an inherent honesty, and in Shauneille Perry’s production, the evening is filled with conviction.”Mr. Esposito, who had been directed earlier that year by Ms. Perry Ryder in another play, “Keyboard,” at the New Federal, recalled her “very intuitive expression of how a story should be told, particularly a Black story.”“I was a young, green actor who had chops,” he added, in a phone interview, “but she taught me that acting is physical. The explosion that comes out of me in the second act came together under her direction.”Ms. Perry Ryder also directed Phillip Hayes Dean’s “Paul Robeson,” which traces the life of the titular singer and social crusader; “Jamimma,” by Martie Evans-Charles, about a young woman who changes her name because of its connection to servility and who is devoted to a man who she is told will never do much more than “wear rags or play instruments”; and “Black Girl,” by J.E. Franklin, about three generations of Black women, including a teenager who yearns to dance.“If you’re Black, you know about these people in any city,” Ms. Perry Ryder told The Times in 1971, referring to the characters in “Black Girl.” “We are all a part of each other.”She won at least two Audelco Awards from the Audience Development Committee, which honors Black theater and artists, and in 2019 received the Lloyd Richards Director’s Award from the National Black Theater Festival, in Winston-Salem, N.C., named after the Tony-winning director of many of August Wilson’s plays.Shauneille Gantt Perry was born on July 26, 1929, in Chicago. Her father, Graham, was one of the first Black assistant attorneys general in Illinois; her mother, Pearl (Gantt) Perry, was a pioneering Black court reporter in Chicago. Lorraine Hansberry, who wrote “A Raisin the Sun,” was one of Shauneille’s cousins.While attending Howard University — where she received a bachelor’s degree in drama in 1950 — Ms. Ryder Perry belonged to a student theater group, the Howard Players, which performed Ibsen’s “The Wild Duck” and Strindberg’s “Miss Julie” on a tour of Scandinavia at the invitation of the Norwegian government. “We were the only Black company to tour those marvelous countries,” she told The Record of Hackensack, N.J., in 1971.She earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1952 at the Goodman School of Drama at the Art Institute of Chicago (now a part of DePaul University). As a Fulbright scholar in 1954, she studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Dissatisfied with the curriculum, however (“they were always doing ‘Cleopatra,’” she said), she transferred to the London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art.Back in Chicago she began acting — she was in a summer stock play, “Mamba’s Daughters,” with Ethel Waters — while also writing for the Black newspaper The Chicago Defender. In 1959, while on a trip to Paris that she had won through an Ebony magazine essay contest, she met the author Richard Wright, who, she recalled, asked her, “They still lynching people back in the States?”“I remember telling him, ‘They do it a little differently there today,’” she told The Times in 1971. But the next day she read about a Black man who had been accused of rape and taken forcibly to a jail cell; his body was later found floating in a river. “I kept wondering to myself,” she said, “‘What is that man saying about my analysis of things?’”And she wondered what she would do when she got home.At first she continued acting. She appeared in various Off Broadway plays, including Josh Greenfeld’s “Clandestine on the Morning Line” (1961), with James Earl Jones, in which a pregnant young woman (Ms. Perry Ryder) from Alabama strolls into a restaurant looking for the father of her child.Edith Oliver, reviewing the play in The New Yorker, praised Ms. Perry Ryder’s “lovely performance,” writing that she gave her role “such quiet, innocent strength and apparent unawareness of the character’s pathos that we almost forget it, too.”Frustrated with the roles she was offered, Ms. Perry Ryder turned to directing, first at the Negro Ensemble Company in New York, with a workshop production of Ms. Franklin’s “Mau Mau Room.”“I got the feeling that maybe there’s a place for me,” she told The Times.Two years later, she directed “The Sty of the Blind Pig” for the Negro Ensemble Company. In the drama, a blind street singer in 1950s Chicago goes to a house on the South Side looking for a woman he once knew.Emory Lewis wrote in his review in The Record that Ms. Perry Ryder “had marshaled her actors with loving attention to period detail and nuance.”Ms. Perry Ryder, left, in 1971 while directing “Black Girl,” a play by J. E. Franklin, right, about three generations of Black women. Produced by the New Federal Theater, it was staged at the Theater de Lys on Christopher Street in Lower Manhattan. Bert Andrews Her theater work continued for more than 40 years, including writing and directing “Things of the Heart: Marian Anderson’s Story,” about the brilliant Black contralto; directing and rewriting the book for a 1999 revival of “In Dahomey,” the first Broadway musical, originally staged in 1903, written by African Americans; and writing a soap opera for a Black radio station in New York City.In 1986, Ms. Perry Ryder joined the faculty of Lehman College in the Bronx, where she taught theater and ran the drama program. At Lehman, she staged “Looking Back: The Music of Micki Grant,” a revue based on Ms. Grant’s theatrical works, which include “Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope.” She retired in 2001.In addition to Lorraine Ryder, Ms. Perry Ryder is survived by two other daughters, Gail Perry-Ryder Tigere and Natalie Ryder Redcross, and four grandchildren. Her husband, Donald Ryder, an architect, died in 2021. More

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      Interview: Shining A Female Light on Diversifications

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      Kaara Benstead on bringing Diversifications to Old Red Lion

      Diversifications is a female centric play about three women who meet in the waiting room to receive the results of their genetic testing. Each has something that the others desire; children, career or freedom. And all desire change.

      A year on from that first encounter, their husbands and partners meet, this time to examine the choices the three women made on that fateful day one year ago.

      The play promises to look at the male versus female perspective on topics as wide ranging as marriage, love and parenthood. And it promises to do so with plenty of humour, however serious life may get.

      Ahead of opening at Old Red Lion on 16 June (tickets here), we caught up with the show’s producer Kaara Benstead to find out more.

      What attracted you to the script originally and made you want to produce this play?

      I really liked the journey the play takes you on through each of the couple’s stories. I also liked that two of the female characters are 40+ and 50+ in age range, as I do not think there are enough acting roles for the older female. The play made me feel all different emotions as there are laugh out loud moments even with the play being about a serious subject. I wanted to produce it as I wanted to have an all female creative team and I do not feel there are enough working class female producers in the industry.

      The play is described as female centric, does that mean it explores its themes very much from a female perspective?

      You do get to hear the men’s perspective and also what each couple went through and the different dynamics in the relationship. It is female centric as it is about the women’s choices and why they made those choices.

      Without giving too many spoilers, it appears that the three women don’t survive to the end of the play, does this make it a sad play or can you still be upbeat and celebratory even when there appears to be so much death present?

      The audience knows from the beginning of the play that the women are dead, as the men meet on the anniversary of Samantha’s death to try and understand why the women made the choices that they did. The play has a whole range of emotions including a lot of laughter as we explore the relationships between the couples, the women and the men. The characters are very relatable and I think people will resonate with the different characters and their approach to life.

      As producer, how much input do you have in how a play develops?

      I have been onboard with the project since 2020 and we have had two read-throughs, one on zoom, one with an audience. I have been a part of all the organising from finding a theatre, to finding the cast with help from Jane Frisby Casting. Sitting in on auditions, finding the creative team, finding a rehearsal venue and all the little things in between. Natalie Ekberg (the writer) has been a massive support with everything and we have regular meetings to make sure everything that needs to be done is getting done. I am also performing in the role of Corinna, so now we are in rehearsals that is when I focus on the acting in the rehearsal room and leave Jess (Barton) is in charge!

      That’s Jess Barton from Fight or Flight who is directing, what does she bring to the play that made you want her onboard?

      We had been looking for a Director for a while but none of them felt right. Jess came recommended first through a theatre contact (Miranda Harrison from Page to Stage) and then through The Old Vic’s call for theatre professionals on Twitter. We reached out to Jess and sent her the play. When we met afterwards, to discuss it, we were impressed how much Jess ‘got’ the play. She connected instantly to the topics we were exploring, she found the play funny yet emotional, she appreciated the pace we were aiming for and she was up for the challenge that the play offered – connecting multiple time lines through multiple characters, who never leave the stage!

      I felt from the beginning of the process that we needed a female Director. With Jess, we didn’t need to explain any intentions behind specific lines, she understood it all instantly.

      And what is it you hope the play will say to its audience, and what they will be discussing back in the pub over a drink come the end?

      When the play was first performed as a short play, the organisers of the evening had to halt the debate that followed. The whole premise of the play is about life choices. We believe the audience would discuss why the characters made their decisions and whether they were justified. They will discuss if they, as individuals, understand and support these choices or whether they condemn them. There will be parts of the audience who will disagree with the actions of some of the characters and that’s ok with us. We want to have a debate. We want the audience to think about the fact that we should pursue our dreams in life while we can and not wait for a specific moment.

      Many thanks to Kaara for taking time away from both producing and rehearsals for Diversifications. The play opens at Old Red Lion 16 June and plays until 2 July. Further information and tickets can be found here. More

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      Review: In ‘Queen,’ the Numbers Don’t Always Add Up

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      Two ambitious scientists are concerned with honey bees in this heady and data-heavy new play, a production of the National Asian American Theater Company.Math is a tool to make sense of the way things work. A minuscule discrepancy becomes the catalyst for a crisis in “Queen,” a heady and data-heavy new play by Madhuri Shekar that opened on Tuesday night at the A.R.T./New York Mezzanine Theater. A hair’s breadth deviation upends not just the outcome of a yearslong study, but how a team of scientists conceive of themselves and life’s purpose.The title refers to matriarchal honey bees, whose declining population is the problem a group of researchers aims to solve. We’re at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where two industrious Ph.D. candidates have designed a study to pinpoint pesticides as the primary culprit in what’s known as “colony collapse disorder,” or the decimation of bees. Their reputations, and the future of pollination, depends on its success.Ariel (Stephanie Janssen), an ecologist and single mom, broke up with an ex to pursue the project, risking her livelihood to take down the chemical conglomerate she blames for putting her beekeeping family out of business. Sanam (Avanthika Srinivasan) is a meticulous mathematician from India whose rich parents keep setting her up with suitors she considers a threat to her ambitions. (“Think of everything I could accomplish if I had a gay husband who would happily leave me alone!” she says, only half joking.) Their professor (Ben Livingston) just wants the numbers to add up, so he can present his students’ findings and reap most of the glory.Sanam’s latest mismatched blind date, Arvind (Keshav Moodliar), a swaggering Wall Street analyst with a surplus of smarm, at least contributes some brain power to her statistical dilemma. Their awkward first meeting leads to a late-night breakthrough in the lab (but no funny business) that further clarifies the mathematical impasse impeding the project, if not the physics that are meant to be propelling the story forward.Arvind (Keshav Moodliar), a swaggering Wall Street analyst, has an awkward first meeting with Sanam (Srinivasan) in “Queen.”Jeremy DanielThe play spends the first half of its 105-minute running time spelling out the details of the study, and the potential missteps that led to an unexpected outcome. Methodical minutiae are positioned as compelling revelations. Jargon dominates arguments about process, crowding out welcome moments of direct connection between characters, all of whom are fueled by presumptions of greatness. Throw in competition and petty jealousies — toward others in the field and among themselves — and it’s tough to find a foothold for sympathy. By the time relationships, between colleagues and lovers, become the ultimate focus, they lack the substantive evidence that would make them feel convincing.Ariel and Sanam are driven by the desire to prove themselves extraordinary, that they might even be capable of saving the world through their intellects. Maybe that’s the essential delusion at the heart of much academic enterprise, but thwarted egos alone don’t make for especially high dramatic stakes. (Nor do the unseen deaths of insects, which we’ve been conditioned to find a nuisance despite their integral role in the food supply.)The production, directed by Aneesha Kudtarkar for the National Asian American Theater Company, is slick and compact. Glass-topped desks arranged in a honeycomb formation take up much of the black box stage in this set design by Junghyun Georgia Lee, limiting the playing space to their periphery. There’s a clean versatility to the staging that suggests the efficiency of a clinical exercise, if not an especially expressive or aesthetic one.“Queen” raises sticky questions about ethics, integrity and the fallibility of accuracy in determining what’s real. But its fascination with empirical nitty-gritty comes at the expense of deeper character development and emotional resonance. Why bees? Why not bees — if observing scientists trying to save them can reveal something essential about who we are. But the conclusions that “Queen” draws are more theoretical than embodied. It takes more blood than intellect to feel a sting.QueenThrough July 1 at the A.R.T./New York Mezzanine Theater, Manhattan; naatco.org. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

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      In ‘Corsicana,’ Will Arbery Puts Art, Family and Down Syndrome Onstage

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      Arbery, a Pulitzer finalist in 2020, is back with a play inspired by his relationship with his sister. But don’t call it an “issue” play.In 2019, Will Arbery scored an unlikely hit with “Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” his darkly comic, boundary-pushing play about young Catholic conservatives debating God, love, friendship and Donald Trump at a late-night party in a Wyoming backyard. A finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize, it won praise both from the heavily liberal New York theater world and from traditionalist Christians who often feel caricatured by it, if they are depicted at all.“Heroes” was a play that, for all the idiosyncrasies of its characters, was hailed as being very much About Something. But on a recent morning, Arbery, 32, was sitting outside a cafe near his apartment in Brooklyn, alternately wrestling with and resisting the question of just what his new play, “Corsicana,” was about.Most simply, “Corsicana,” which runs until July 10 at Playwrights Horizons, is about four people in that small city in Texas, including a young woman with Down syndrome, her aspiring filmmaker brother and a reclusive self-taught artist who comes into their orbit. Inspired by Arbery’s relationship with his older sister Julia, it’s the rare play to feature both a lead character — and a lead actor — with Down syndrome.But it’s also, Arbery said, a play that “very stubbornly defies about-ness.”Will Dagger, left, in “Corsicana” with Deirdre O’Connell, center, and Jamie Brewer. The play, Arbery said, “very stubbornly defies about-ness.”Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“When you first walk in, you might say oh, this is a couch play, or an artist-on-the-edge-of-town play, or a Down syndrome play,” he said. “But it’s more of an accumulation. It’s not like any of those things are false — they’re all there — but something else is operating that can’t be named.”The goal, he said, was a “widening complexity.” If audiences could “categorize the play too easily, then they could categorize Julia too easily,” he said. “And that’s the opposite of what I want to do.”“Corsicana,” directed by Sam Gold at the same theater that first staged “Heroes,” is something of a homecoming for Arbery, who since 2019 has been living the life of a hot young playwright. There have been multiple productions around the world of “Heroes” and his previous play, “Plano,” also inspired by his family. Another play, “Evanston Salt Costs Climbing,” from 2018, will have its New York premiere in the fall with the New Group. And Hollywood has been calling. In February 2020, he spent a month in London consulting on HBO’s “Succession,” immersing himself in the acid-bath dynamics of a very different clan.“I just sat there and made a vow to myself to say at least one thing a day,” he said of the writers room. “It was an intimidatingly brilliant and funny group of people.” (Evidently, he passed muster. He recently wrapped work on Season 4, on which he’s credited as a co-producer.)“Corsicana,” which Arbery started before the pandemic, was inspired in part by an artists residency in the same small Texas city as the play is set. But it’s also, as he puts it, a play he has been writing his whole life.Arbery, who grew up in Dallas with seven sisters in a conservative Catholic milieu similar to that of “Heroes,” had always wanted to write a play about his relationship with Julia, who is two years older (as she likes to remind him). But he didn’t want to write, as he puts it, an “issue play.”“I wanted to do it in the way it felt like growing up,” he said, where Julia “was just part of the fabric of daily life, a member of the family and the team.”Julia Arbery, shown with Will in 2016, said they have always been able to talk “about our feelings, excitement, sadness” and “about our hearts.”via Will ArberyIn “Corsicana,” the young filmmaker, Christopher (Will Dagger), has put aside his own ambitions to come home and live with his sister Ginny (Jamie Brewer) after their mother’s death. Through their mother’s best friend (Deirdre O’Connell, a 2022 Tony winner for “Dana H”), Christopher arranges for Ginny to spend time with Lot (Harold Surratt), a reclusive self-taught artist who makes kaleidoscopic sculptures out of junk, and who bristles at the idea that people might see him, like Ginny, as “special.”Lot also makes tapes of his strange, homespun songs (reminiscent of the “outsider” Texas songwriter Daniel Johnston). The hope is that he and Ginny — whose tastes run more to Whitney Houston, Hilary Duff and the Chicks — will write a song together, to pull her out of her funk.“Corsicana” explores art, grief, privacy, gifts, family and community, and how the meanings of creative acts change depending on who witnesses them — and whether some things should have an audience at all. There are pop-culture one-liners and bigger philosophical talk, along with surreal riffs on dinosaurs, ghosts, history and books that never get read.Arbery described Julia, an ardent music fan who sings with a choir, as “a natural performer.” But like Lot in the play (whose work we never see), he said, she does much of her creation in her room, for “an audience of no one.”“If you’re lucky to walk by and the door’s ajar and you see her busting these moves that are just unbelievable,” he said. “I felt like that’s the most honest place to write from, outside that door, and having the audience outside too, but with the terms clearly set — you’re not allowed to look back there.”If Ginny mostly sings behind closed doors, Jamie Brewer, the actress who plays her, is a seasoned professional. Brewer, who has performed since she was a child, has appeared in several seasons of “American Horror Story.” In 2018, she became what is believed to be the first actor with Down syndrome to play the lead in a Broadway or Off Broadway play, in Lindsey Ferrentino’s “Amy and the Orphans.”“Amy” was about a group of siblings learning the fuller story of their sister, who had been institutionalized as a child and neglected by the family. “Corsicana,” which Brewer described as much “wordier” than “Amy,” offers a different window on the experience of living with Down syndrome, depicting Christopher and Ginny’s relationship as emotionally equal and ordinary, down to their private jokes and fights.“I love being part of a play that shows everyone who we are,” Brewer, 37, said in a video interview. “We’re all the same as everyone — we have the same wants and needs, the drive, the desire, the individual sense of self.”Julia Arbery in “Your Resources,” a 2016 short film by Will Arbery. The film “is a little embarrassing,” Will said. But Julia “is really good.”Will Arbery Julia Arbery, who turns 35 in July, lives with her parents in Wyoming, and works in the dining hall at Wyoming Catholic College, a small conservative liberal arts institution where their father, Glenn, is president, and their mother, Virginia, teaches political science.In a joint video interview with Will, Julia described him as “my favorite brother,” which wasn’t the only time they cracked each other up. (He’s her only brother.) She said they have always been able to talk “about our feelings, excitement, sadness” and “about our hearts.”Julia was about to make her first trip to New York, to see “Corsicana” — the first time she’s seen a professional production of one of his plays. Julia, a country music fan who used to sing in a choir, doesn’t know many details of the play. But she said she was especially excited to hear Ginny and Lot’s song (co-written by Arbery and the indie musician and artist Joanna Sternberg).There’s a scene in the play where Christopher, the would-be hipster auteur, asks Ginny (a “High School Musical” fan) if she wants to be in one of his movies. “Is it going to be good?” she shoots back. (So much of “Corsicana,” Arbery said, “is a tug of war about taste.”)In real life, Julia has acted in some of her brother’s short films, including the sci-fi-tinged “Your Resources,” shot in 2016 at their parents’ ranch-like home, starring Julia as a young woman who enters a contest to win a brain implant developed by a sinister futuristic corporation, so she can be “different” and help her ailing father (played by Glenn Arbery).“The short film is a little embarrassing,” Will said later by email. But “Julia is really good.”They have also been talking about making a hybrid documentary-feature, about Will filming Julia directing a mash-up of “The Princess Bride” (one of their favorites) and Liam Neeson’s “Taken.”Julia, he said, inspired not just this play, but his approach to writing.“From a very young age, she keyed me into this idea that a way a person uses language is a fingerprint,” he said. “It always felt very clear to me that she was the reason I was doing some of this.” More

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      ‘Topdog/Underdog’ to Star Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Corey Hawkins

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      The 20th anniversary Broadway revival will be directed by Kenny Leon. Previews begin in September at the John Golden Theater.Corey Hawkins and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II will star this fall in a Broadway revival of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Pulitzer-winning comic drama “Topdog/Underdog.”The play, first staged on Broadway in 2002 after an Off Broadway run at the Public Theater, is a portrait of two brothers: One, named Lincoln (Hawkins), is an Abraham Lincoln impersonator and the other, named Booth (Abdul-Mateen), aspires to play three-card monte the way his brother once had.In 2018, The New York Times declared “Topdog/Underdog” the best American play of the previous 25 years. Explaining that choice, the critic Ben Brantley wrote that the play “plies the fine theatrical art of deception to convey the dangers of role-playing in a society in which race is a performance and prison.”Hawkins, 33, has been featured in a string of films, including “In the Heights,” “The Tragedy of Macbeth” and “Straight Outta Compton.” He has two previous Broadway credits, and picked up a Tony nomination in 2017 for his starring role in a revival of “Six Degrees of Separation.”Abdul-Mateen, 35, is best known for his work in the HBO series “Watchmen,” and he recently was featured in the films “Ambulance,” “The Matrix Resurrections” and “Candyman.” “Topdog/Underdog” will be his Broadway debut.The original Broadway production starred Jeffrey Wright and Yasiin Bey, who was known at the time as Mos Def.This 20th anniversary revival, scheduled to run for 16 weeks, is to begin previews Sept. 27 and to open Oct. 20 at the John Golden Theater. It will be directed by Kenny Leon, who in 2014 won a Tony Award for directing a revival of “A Raisin in the Sun.” The producers are David Stone, a lead producer of “Wicked,” as well as LaChanze, Rashad V. Chambers, Marc Platt, Debra Martin Chase and the Shubert Organization.This season is shaping up to be a big one for Parks. In addition to the Broadway revival of “Topdog/Underdog,” the Public Theater on Tuesday said it would stage productions of two new works she has written: “Plays for the Plague Year,” a series of playlets Parks wrote during the early pandemic, and “The Harder They Come,” a musical adaptation of the 1972 film, with a book by Parks and a score that includes songs by Jimmy Cliff. More

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      City Center’s Season to Feature an International Fall for Dance

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      The festival welcomes foreign troupes for the first time since 2019; other City Center highlights include Twyla Tharp and “The Light in the Piazza” at Encores!“Oliver!,” the return of the National Ballet of Canada and a Twyla Tharp program are among the offerings for New York City Center’s 2022-23 season, the theater announced on Tuesday.“Coming off the pandemic we had a really strong season,” said Arlene Shuler, City Center’s president and chief executive, adding, “I want audiences to take away that City Center is as strong as ever.”The 2022-23 season, Shuler’s last, opens with the Fall for Dance Festival, which for the first time since 2019 will have an international lineup, including the Kyiv City Ballet from Ukraine, as well as companies and artists from France, Germany, India and the Netherlands.Fall for Dance, which Shuler initiated in 2004, remains central to her legacy at the theater. The festival’s eclectic mix of dance companies and low-cost tickets has expanded accessibility to the public and solidified relationships with artists.Also in fall, Twyla Tharp returns to the theater, Oct. 19-23, with two works: “In the Upper Room” (1986) and “Nine Sinatra Songs” (1982), which Shuler called “masterworks — not just for Twyla but for the 20th century.” The program follows last year’s “Twyla Now.”The National Ballet of Canada will take the City Center stage for the first time in 15 years. The program, with live music by the National Ballet of Canada Orchestra, features three performances, including Crystal Pite’s “Angels’ Atlas.” It is set to run from March 30-April 1, 2023.City Center’s Encores! will present “The Light in the Piazza” (Feb. 1-5), Jerry Herman’s “Dear World” (March 15-19) and Lionel Bart’s “Oliver!” (May 3-14). And “Parade,” starring Micaela Diamond and Ben Platt in Alfred Uhry’s Tony Award-winning musical about the 1915 lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish American in Georgia, will be City Center’s annual gala production, on Nov. 1-6.Dance programming at City Center will also include Sara Baras and her company at the annual Flamenco Festival (March 23-26), and Ballet Hispánico, which will perform “Club Havana 18+1” (June 1-3).This year’s City Center Dance Festival, titled “From the Street,” will celebrate the diversity of forms in contemporary hip-hop. The year will close with “Sugar Hill: The Ellington/Strayhorn Nutcracker” (Nov. 15-27), a jazz-infused retelling of the holiday classic, and the annual season of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (Nov. 30-Dec. 24), with new works by Kyle Abraham and Jamar Roberts. More

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      ‘Quince’ Review: A Mexican American Tale That Explains Too Much

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      The new play, about a 15-year-old girl and her impending quinceañera, creates a fitting party vibe. If only the script didn’t clarify every cultural reference.In the backyard of a modest house with a thriving garden, a woman in a brimmed hat festooned with streamers bends over the flowers, tending to them silently. Her face a mask, she pays no attention to the pair of teenage sweethearts in the midst of a private talk.“That’s my grandma,” says Cindy, whose yard this is.“I thought your grandma was dead,” Kaitlyn says.She is, Cindy confirms: buried in Mexico and everything. But after her grandmother had a fight with her cousin, who was interred in a neighboring grave, “she left there, came here.” Now she hangs out in the garden, looking after the greenery.“This is why I don’t invite you over,” Cindy says, unsurprised by her girlfriend’s confusion; Kaitlyn is white, after all. “I can’t explain all this stuff all the time.”The creators of “Quince,” the shimmery immersive production that inaugurates the Bushwick Starr’s new theater in a former dairy plant in Brooklyn, have the opposite impulse. Written by Camilo Quiroz-Vázquez and directed by Ellpetha Tsivicos, this too-educative play — presented with their company, One Whale’s Tale — wants to invite all of us into its story of Cindy and her impending quinceañera, a coming-of-age celebration to mark her 15th birthday. To achieve that, it is more than willing to explicate Mexican and Mexican American culture for its audience every step of the way.To be fair, white American theatergoers have come to expect that kind of coddling, and no one wants to parade the complexity of their heritage in front of people who don’t understand it. But I’m with Cindy on this. Constant footnoting is exhausting — a drag on the festivities and also on the drama. Of which, in her life, she has plenty.Raised by her strict single mother, Maria (Brenda Flores), in a family so devoutly Roman Catholic that the parish priest is a regular presence in their home, Cindy (Sara Gutierrez) is squeamish about more than just explaining her grandmother’s ghost. She’s also embarrassed by her family’s lack of money, uncomfortable with her queerness and terrified of how Maria would react if she found out about it.Performed mostly in English, partly in Spanish, “Quince” traces Cindy’s journey toward self-acceptance — and Maria’s, too. Overworked and short on patience, Maria is carrying her own unwarranted shame that needs exorcising: the spiritual damage of having been branded sinful when she was 15 and pregnant with Cindy, half a lifetime ago.Salomon (José Pérez), Maria’s anxious brother, gives Cindy the gift of gentle allyship when she comes out to him, while the affable Father Joaquin (a charming Quiroz-Vázquez) tries to facilitate reconciliation all around. (When, over a beer in the kitchen with Salomon, this seemingly decent priest nearly violates the sanctity of the confessional by divulging what Cindy said to him there, his recklessness goes mystifyingly unremarked.)Gutierrez, center, with Saige Larmer, who plays her girlfriend. Drinks are for sale, and the audience sits at tables in a tinsel-curtained space. Maria BaranovaDuring the pandemic-stricken, pre-vaccine summer of 2020, when there was almost no live theater in New York, an earlier, much shorter version of “Quince” had a handful of open-air performances at the People’s Garden in Brooklyn. In the current incarnation, a Mexican food cart sits outside the theater preshow, and ticket holders are welcome to buy meals that they can eat during the performance. Drinks are for sale inside, where the audience sits at tables in a tinsel-curtained space decorated for Cindy’s celebration. (Scenic design is by Tanya Orellana; Tsivicos is credited as the creative director.)With a stage at one end of the long room for the terrific band (Marilyn Castillo, Andrés Fonseca, Juan Ospina and Sebastian Angel), an aisle down the center that lets the actors move among the audience and three mini-sets scattered throughout, it is a good-looking production, beguilingly lit by Mextly Couzin, with costumes by Scarlet Moreno.But the show feels inorganic and at odds with itself, straining toward mystical expression and physical abandon yet tethered to an earthbound script that meanders for too long before arriving at Cindy’s party. Occasionally it has the tone of an after-school special — albeit one that breaks into cumbia music and includes, toward the end, a Selena impersonator (Tsivicos). This play doesn’t dance nearly as much as it wants to, and its ghosts and apparitions (in beautiful masks by Quiroz-Vázquez, Zoë Batson and Courtney Escoto) fit awkwardly alongside the sometimes groan-worthy comedy.The romance between Cindy and Kaitlyn (Saige Larmer) is sweet; the healing that Maria eventually finds is a benevolence. But the show feels dumbed down, its magic dulled and focus diluted by a determination to be understood at an elementary level by people from the broader culture — even the ones who gravitate toward new work in industrial spaces in Bushwick.Trusting the audience is a risky undertaking. But we’re more curious, and more comfortable with artful ambiguity, than “Quince” gives us credit for.QuinceThrough June 26 at the Bushwick Starr, Brooklyn; thebushwickstarr.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      Original ‘Spring Awakening’ Cast Reunites for 2022 Tonys Performance

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      More than 15 years after they stormed Broadway as an angsty set of adolescents, the original cast of the musical “Spring Awakening” reunited Sunday night at the Tonys and offered a special rendition of one of the musical’s most enduring songs.One of the show’s stars, Lea Michele, introduced the cast alongside Zach Braff who, not coincidently, introduced the show to Tony audiences in 2007 when it won the award for best musical. Led by Skylar Astin, the cast sang a soulful edition of “Touch Me.”The 2006 Steven Sater musical, an adaptation of the Frank Wedekind play from the turn of the 20th century, is about German teenagers grappling with sexual desires, secret pain and parental pressure. It vaulted several of its stars — such as Michele, Jonathan Groff, John Gallagher Jr. — to wider fame, won eight Tony Awards, and played more than 850 performances.A scene from “Spring Awakening” in 2006.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe Tony performance on Sunday appeared to book end a reunion that has played out over the last several months. In November, the original cast reunited for one night at the Imperial Theater for a 15th anniversary concert benefiting the Entertainment Community Fund (previously The Actors Fund). The performance was recorded by HBO and released earlier this year as a film: ‘Spring Awakening: Those You’ve Known.’ More