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      Wendell Pierce to Star in ‘Death of a Salesman’ on Broadway

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      The production, also starring Sharon D Clarke and featuring André De Shields, will arrive some time next season.Wendell Pierce is ready for another run as Willy Loman.The American actor, best known for his work in “The Wire,” first took on the titanic title role in “Death of a Salesman” in London in 2019, and even then he hungered to bring the performance to New York.Now he’ll get that chance: A group of producers announced Monday that they would transfer the London production to Broadway next season.Pierce will once again star opposite Sharon D Clarke, a British actress who wowed critics and audiences in New York this season with her star turn in a revival of the musical “Caroline, or Change.” Pierce and Clarke played the husband and wife, Willy and Linda Loman, at the Young Vic in London, and then in the West End; Clarke won an Olivier Award as best actress.“I have waited for this moment for a long time — I’m so excited to do this classic American play and join the fraternity of artists who have brought it to life,” Pierce said in a telephone interview. He called the role “the American Hamlet,” and said he had seen many of the best-known performances — Dustin Hoffman, Brian Dennehy and Philip Seymour Hoffman onstage, as well as Fredric March and Lee J. Cobb on film. “It will challenge me, not just as an artist but as a man, to take the time to be self-reflective and consider all the themes in this play: Are my best days behind me? Where have I lost hope? What do I want to leave behind? That’s a worthwhile journey of self-reflection to go on.”“Death of a Salesman,” often regarded as one of the greatest American plays, is about a traveling salesman whose career, and mental state, are falling apart. The play, by Arthur Miller, opened on Broadway in 1949 and won both the Pulitzer Prize for drama and the Tony Award for best play; it has been revived on Broadway four times, winning a slew of Tony Awards over the years.This latest production, with the blessing of the Miller estate, offers a new take on the play’s inherent tensions by portraying the Loman family as African American and the other characters (co-workers, neighbors and a love interest) as white.André De Shields, who this month wraps up his Tony-winning run as Hermes in “Hadestown,” will join the cast as Willy’s deceased brother, Ben. And Khris Davis (“Sweat”) will play Biff, one of the Lomans’ two sons.The Broadway production will be directed by Miranda Cromwell, who in London directed it alongside Marianne Elliott. Elliott will remain with the show as a producer.Cromwell, in an interview, said “it’s the same production, but some things will shift as we refine it.” She also said that, as a mixed-race woman, “there are elements of my lived experience that I’ve brought to the production.”She added: “So many of the elements of the play are fundamentally questioning of the American dream, and when you put that through the perspective of the Black experience, that enriches it — the obstacles are harder, and the stakes become higher through this lens.”The revival will be produced by Cindy Tolan, best known as a casting director; Elliott & Harper Productions, which is Elliott’s production company with Chris Harper; and Kwame Kwei-Armah, who is the artistic director of the Young Vic.The producer Scott Rudin had previously been planning to bring a “Salesman” revival to Broadway starring Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf; he stopped working as a producer after being criticized for the way he treated others, and the team behind the London revival was able to pick up the rights to bring their production to Broadway. More

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      On the Scene: Hillary Clinton at ‘Suffs’

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      On the Scene: Hillary Clinton at ‘Suffs’Jennifer Schuessler�� Reporting from the Public TheaterSara Krulwich/The New York Times“Suffs,” written by Shaina Taub, covers the final years of the fight for the 19th Amendment, which passed in 1920. As the lights dimmed, the cast, costumed as jeering men, filed onstage for “Watch Out for the Suffragette!,” a vaudeville-style number inspired by real anti-suffrage songs. More

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      Review: In ‘Jerusalem,’ a Once-in-a-Lifetime Performance, Again

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      Mark Rylance is back in a role that won him a Tony more than a decade ago. But this London production isn’t just coasting on past kudos.LONDON — There’s mighty, and then there’s Mark Rylance in “Jerusalem,” a performance so powerfully connected to its part that it feels almost superhuman. That’s as it should be for a play about a larger-than-life character named Johnny Byron, who demands an entirely fearless actor, and has one in Rylance.None of this will surprise those familiar with this play by Jez Butterworth, which premiered with Rylance in the lead role at the Royal Court here in 2009; two years later, it transferred to Broadway and won Rylance the second of three Tony Awards. In a thrilling revival that opened Thursday at the Apollo Theater (running through Aug. 7), everything feels enriched by time.Now 62, Rylance is considerably older than a man described in the text as “about 50.” But such is this actor’s boundless energy and enthusiasm that you can imagine him returning to the role again and again: Johnny defies all conventions, including those of age, and so does a wildly versatile actor who approaches this societal rebel as a kindred spirit.The creative team, headed by Ian Rickson, the most empathic of directors, is the same as it was in 2009. To this run’s credit, it is no museum piece coasting on past kudos, but a vital experience with a revitalizing effect. Standing ovations are commonplace here these days, but the one at Wednesday’s final preview possessed a singular fervor that had Rylance jumping up and down with childlike glee at the curtain call.In the show, Johnny, who goes by the nickname Rooster, walks with a halting gait that goes unexplained. Physical impediments, it seems, barely matter to this tattooed, barrel-chested reprobate, who performs a headstand within minutes of his arrival onstage. He then downs a mixture of vodka, milk and a raw egg, whose shell Rylance tosses into the audience. (On Wednesday, someone tossed the shell back, prompting a delicious double take from the star.)Johnny’s outsize gestures are those of a man whose defiantly reckless existence is under serious threat. While the rural community in which he lives is holding its annual spring fete to mark St. George’s Day, Johnny tenaciously stays at the beat-up trailer he has long called home. A magnet for a cross-section of local hangers-on, including a loquacious professor (a beautiful turn from Alan David) and underage female adolescents hungry for spliffs and sex, Johnny’s illegal encampment is soon to be bulldozed. His young son arrives for a visit, only to be whisked away by the child’s disapproving mother (a persuasive Indra Ové).From left, Charlotte O’Leary, Mark Rylance, Mackenzie Crook, Kemi Awoderu and Ed Kear in “Jerusalem.”Simon AnnandNot only is Johnny faced with a final order from government officials to move on, but he must confront the wrath of Troy Whitworth (a fearsome Barry Sloane), whose 15-year-old stepdaughter, Phaedra, has sought refuge with Johnny. Troy will go to violent lengths to claim her back.It’s Phaedra (Eleanor Worthington-Cox) who opens the play, singing the English hymn that gives “Jerusalem” its title and whose lyricist, William Blake, is referenced during a game of Trivial Pursuit later on. Worthington-Cox delivers this most stirring of tunes in front of a drop curtain depicting the cross of St. George, England’s flag. But the play itself transcends nationality to speak to any disaffected outsider who won’t be easily silenced and who gathers acolytes like moths to an inextinguishable flame.I’ve now seen “Jerusalem” five times (including on Broadway), and Rickson’s current company — several of them holdovers, with Rylance — are as good as any predecessors, and sometimes better: Worthington-Cox is the most moving Phaedra I have experienced.Mackenzie Crook remains especially heartbreaking as Ginger, Johnny’s friend and ally whose haunted eyes convey a premonition that his buddy’s days are numbered. Jack Riddiford, a company newcomer, brings a boyish appeal to the role of Lee, who dreams of starting afresh in Australia but is thankful for the raucous good times that Johnny has made possible on home soil.You can imagine one or two of these characters as avid supporters of Brexit, though the idea didn’t exist when Butterworth wrote the play: The sweary abattoir-worker Davey (Ed Kear, another cast newcomer) doesn’t “see the point,” he says, of other countries, including neighboring Wales. British newspapers have been busily assessing “Jerusalem” as a defining state-of-the-nation commentary whose legacy and influence are incalculable. Butterworth has stayed out of the discussion, saying only that he revived the play so his young daughter, Bel, could see it.But such considerations are academic next to the visceral immediacy of a play that soars as high as the designer Ultz’s ravishing tree-filled set, which seems to sweep up beyond the theater’s roof. That vast reach is of a piece with a performance you might describe as once-in-a-lifetime, if it weren’t so evident that Rylance’s passion for this part, thank goodness, seems far from over yet.JerusalemThrough Aug. 7 at the Apollo Theater, London; jerusalemtheplay.co.uk. More

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      Michael R. Jackson’s Big Broadway Thriller

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      During a walk along the Great White Way this winter, I saw something peculiar: two marquees advertising two Michael Jacksons. On 52nd Street, at the Neil Simon Theater, where “MJ: The Musical” has been running since December, there’s a graphic of the King of Pop in his iconic early ’90s pose: fedora perched low, obscuring his face; shirttails flying in the artificial wind; white glove; high-water pants; sparkling socks; feet en pointe. Seven blocks away, at the Lyceum Theater on 45th Street, another sign bore the name “Michael Jackson” and an illustration of a 20-something Black man’s head in semi-profile, with six tiny bodies floating around his face and hair. This image advertised “A Strange Loop,” the playwright Michael R. Jackson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning metafictional musical, which premiered on Broadway in April.“It’s a strange loop,” Jackson told me on the phone when I mentioned the coincidence. He chuckled, his buoyant, lisp-tinged laughter calling to mind fluttering shirttails. “See what I did there?” He stopped, started again, wanting to clarify. “When I say that, I mean that, my whole identity as a person just in the world, has always been sort of tied to that man, because of our names. That’s been both an annoyance and a help.”Jackson has embraced the absurdity of the coincidence — his website name and Instagram handle is “thelivingmichaeljackson,” for example. “Certainly whenever my name is mentioned, the ghost of him appears somewhere. But we’re two very different artists working in two very different traditions.” He paused, punctuating his thinking with ellipsis, his voice relaxed and slowly propulsive, as if his sentences were bridges he was building as he walked over them. “And yet, there’s something about his legacy that is invoked whenever my name comes up. There’s a certain excitement that comes up, and maybe I’ve been able to utilize that. I think that’s true. And I think that maybe it’s given me a certain kind of confidence, perhaps, as somebody in the entertainment world because ‘Michael Jackson’ stands for pop excellence and razzmatazz and razzle-dazzle, and that’s certainly something that I aspire to in my own work.”“A Strange Loop,” which is being marketed as a “big, Black, queer-ass American musical,” is in part about how identity is cobbled together out of the flotsam of pop culture: how the faces we present to the world are neither organic nor stolen, but co-opted, borrowed and reshaped in the borrowing. Jackson relishes the playfulness at work in these kinds of appropriations, and the show bristles with references as varied as Bravo’s “Real Housewives” franchise; the writing of bell hooks; Dan Savage, the advice columnist; “Hamilton”; Stephen Sondheim. The title carries its own layers of reference: to Liz Phair’s 1993 song “Strange Loop” and to the work of Douglas Hofstadter, the scholar of cognitive science and comparative literature. In his 1979 book “Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid,” Hofstadter coined the term “a strange loop” to describe the recursive nature of selfhood and intelligence.Jackson is dead set against contemporary virtuousness: a puritanical need for fixed, context-repellent delineations of right and wrong.The show is a product of Jackson’s own vicissitudinous loops: his fits and starts of success and failure, when he was working, for five years, as an usher at “The Lion King” and “Mary Poppins” while revising his own play over and over and over again, trying not to give up. Jackson says that the show is not autobiographical but “self-referential,” though the parallels between him and his protagonist are striking. The story concerns Usher (played with vulnerability, charm and delicacy by Jaquel Spivey), a 25-year-old “fat American Black gay man of high intelligence, low self-image and deep feelings.” Like his creator, Usher works as an usher for “The Lion King” and shares his name with a pop star. (In the memory palace of his mind, his relatives are named for “Lion King” characters: His mother and father are called Sarabi and Mufasa, his niece is Nala, his ne’er-do-well brother is Scar.) He “writes stories and songs and wants desperately to be heard.”Usher is trying to develop his own musical — about a Disney usher who’s writing an original musical about an usher who’s writing a musical, and so on — as he deals with the impositions of his mind, which are personified as six Greek-​chorus-like “Thoughts” who voice his desires and cutting internal commentary. The Thoughts (played by L Morgan Lee, James Jackson Jr., John-Michael Lyles, John-Andrew Morrison, Jason Veasey and Antwayn Hopper) are “a spectrum of bodies that are Usher’s perceptions of reality inside and out.” They “come in many shapes and sizes. But they are all Black. And they are as individual in expression as they are a unit.”Usher must reconcile the seeming contradictions of his life. He is gay but was raised religious and taught that homosexuality would send him to hell. He uses Grindr but considers himself a feminist — someone who can see through the race- and body-shaming that frequently occur on dating apps. He yearns to be himself and pursue his own artistic inclinations yet feels pressure to pay his parents back for their support by ghostwriting a Tyler Perry play. In the musical’s scintillating, uproarious opening number, “Intermission Song,” Usher declares that he wants to “subvert expectations Black and white, from the left and the right, for the good of the culture.” This idea of subverting expectations — of presenting art that grinds the gears of easy understanding to a halt — is crucial to Jackson’s work.Jackson overlooking the set at the Lyceum Theater in April.Malike Sidibe for The New York TimesOne day, Jackson and I sat together in a Chelsea diner and discussed a play we’d both recently seen (a period piece that Jackson asked me not to name). He detected in the show the urge in many contemporary works of art to retrofit current attitudes onto historical matters. “Everybody keeps trying to speak to the moment,” he said, and punctuated his words by tapping the menu on the table, improvising his own percussive track. “There’s so much presentism in so many works, particularly the ones that are dealing with historical issues. I’m kind of like, Why is there this weird rewriting of history so that it can flatter you and validate you? Why can’t we just tell stories about these people as they were and whatever their positions and attitudes were? I think that that’s actually a lot more powerful, because then you can understand how other people lived and thought and dreamed and made mistakes or whatever. I keep seeing all of this stuff that’s like, This is just like right now, and I’m like, No it isn’t!”The show we discussed treated almost every white character as evil but didn’t give that behavior any emotional or psychological foundation. Yes, racism is ridiculous, but the people who subscribe to it don’t feel that way; if characterization is to be believable, it has to accurately and seriously portray even the views that belong to abhorrent people. Otherwise you get what Toni Morrison called “harangue passing off as art,” and characters who are mere vehicles for political arguments. “There’s a nuance that I feel is being lost in this moment in time, particularly in the arts, in the theater especially, that I am personally at war with,” Jackson said.Jackson is dead set against contemporary virtuousness: a puritanical need for fixed, context-repellent delineations of right and wrong; the performance of utmost certainty, all the time. “A Strange Loop” is dedicated to feelings of uncertainty, presenting, with vivid detail, the internal logic of a character who’s fighting with himself. The self is arguably everyone’s first and most recurrent battleground, and Jackson stages internal chaos that far outstrips arguments you might find between partisan politicians or on Twitter.One of Usher’s Thoughts is called “Your Daily Self-Loathing,” and as you’d expect, it regularly reminds him of how worthless he is. Another Thought is the supervisor of Usher’s “sexual ambivalence”; others represent his loving mother’s religious upbraiding and his father’s confused, macho judgment; others stand in for student-loan collectors and an opportunistic agent. With all of this at play, Usher has to find a way to assert his own value or to “fight for his right to live in a world that chews up and spits out Black queers on the daily,” but first he has to find some peace with his flaws, whether real or imagined.It took Jackson decades to achieve the kind of clarity that Usher yearns for and to distill it into this play. “The only reason why I come to any of these conclusions is because I spent almost 20 years working on one piece of art,” Jackson said. “And the exercise of that forced me to have to really be thoughtful and really be open to changing my mind. I’ve changed my mind so many times with new information coming along.” This thought eventually took him to a Joni Mitchell lyric, from her 1985 song “Dog Eat Dog,” which he quoted to me after breaking into an improvised medley of her deep cuts: “Land of snap decisions/Land of short attention spans/Nothing is savored/Long enough to really understand.”Jackson, who is 41, was born and raised in Motown. Growing up “middle middle-class” in Detroit in the 1980s and ’90s, he had what he calls “a normal external childhood.” His father was in the police force for 27 years before he retired to work as a security consultant for General Motors, and his mother worked in the accounts-receivable department of the automotive manufacturer American Axle. His brother, who is four and a half years older, took him to see horror-comedy films like Rusty Cundieff’s “Tales From the Hood.” They all went to First Glory Missionary Baptist Church, where his mother was a secretary and his father a trustee. Jackson sang in the main choir and played piano for the Sonshine Choir (for little kids) and the Inspirational Choir (for older women). He appreciated church as kind of a workshop; it gave him a chance to hone his craft. “It was just a place for me to play music and to teach songs, and it was almost like I was playing in a jazz club or something. I was building my musical chops playing in front of an audience and for choirs every Sunday.”Pop culture suffused his life. He attended Cass Technical High School, where the legends of alumni like Diana Ross, Lily Tomlin, Ellen Burstyn, Jack White and Kenya Moore haunted the hallways. Jackson’s preteen bedroom was covered with autographed photos of his favorite celebrities that he’d sent away for: Macaulay Culkin, Jasmine Guy, Kadeem Hardison, Anna Chlumsky, Emilio Estevez and Tim Allen, or “whoever was on some TV show or movie I was watching.” In high school he drafted award-​winning poems and worked on a literary journal. Even then, his thinking resisted easy judgment and retained the right to take its time. In a passage in his journal marked by strikethroughs and scribbled-out ink, he wrote about O.J. Simpson’s 1997 civil trial for the death of his ex-wife Nicole Brown: “I don’t know how I feel. At first, I thought he was innocent. Then during the civil case, I thought he was guilty — in both cases I didn’t care whether he did it or not. I resented the fact that people assumed he was either totally capable of murder or not capable of murder.”While his external circumstances were comfortable, internally he was struggling with accepting his sexuality. When he came out to his parents at 17, they confronted him; Jackson says his father asked his son, passive-​aggressively, if he was attracted to him, a moment Jackson reprises in “A Strange Loop.” (He’s on really great terms with his parents now.)It was around this time that Jackson was first introduced to what he calls “white-girl music” after his cousin studied at Interlochen Center for the Arts in 1995 or 1996, and brought back Tori Amos’s albums “Little Earthquakes” and “Under the Pink.” “I was just sort of coming out at that time and trying to figure things out, and that music hooked me right in. The language is very riddlelike, but the music underneath it is so complex and lush and complicated, and I just kept listening. And then the second track comes on: ‘God, sometimes you just don’t come through.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, yeah,’ because I was raised in church, and I was having a lot of questions about that.” Amos’s music “met me right where I was at that moment in time. And because I was also writing, it gave me permission to start saying things that I was thinking or feeling or wondering about in like a profane sort of way. And so I began copying her immediately just trying to find my voice.”He also loved Liz Phair and Joni Mitchell and considers the three songwriters his own private religious triptych: Mitchell is the mother, Phair is the daughter and Amos, Jackson’s “first love,” is the Holy Spirit. “These white women singer-​songwriters inspired me to be my truest, rawest self,” he told me. For “A Strange Loop,” Jackson wrote “Inner White Girl,” an ingenious paean to the emotional and lyrical freedom those women employ in their music: “Black boys don’t get to be cool, tall, vulnerable and luscious/Don’t get to be wild and unwise/Don’t get to be shy and introspective/Don’t get to make noise, don’t get to fantasize.”In 1999, Jackson left Michigan to attend Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Shortly after he graduated, he wrote a monologue, a vehicle for his career anxiety called “Why I Can’t Get Work,” that became the kernel of “A Strange Loop.” He kept writing and developing songs in Tisch’s M.F.A. playwriting and musical-theater program, and after that, all while ushering at the Disney musicals. Later, he worked at an advertising agency. Influenced by “Hair,” Wayne Koestenbaum and Michael Daugherty’s “Jackie O,” Kirsten Childs’s “The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin” and Stew’s “Passing Strange,” Jackson kept hacking away at the collection of songs and dialogue that eventually became the musical, trying to make something uniquely his own. These were lonely years for Jackson in New York City, when he was alternately not dating and chasing unattainable paramours, hating himself and finding internal armistice, losing weight and gaining it back.As he aimed to finish “A Strange Loop,” the thing that delayed his progress, he told me, was his own self-loathing. He could not shake the feeling that many things were wrong with him: his gayness, his fatness, his chosen career path. Because the play is so self-referential, Jackson had to figure out his own life before knowing how Usher fares, and therefore how the musical ends. Sometime in 2014 or 2015, Jackson had a breakthrough. During a therapy session, he was engaging in the practice of “tapping,” where you touch various chakras throughout the body and say, “Even though [fill in the blank], I completely and totally accept myself.” That session, he told me, “brought up a sense of grief for my childhood and how sad I had been for a long time — feeling like I didn’t belong or fit in and being able to have compassion for my younger self who was still with me. And having that moment was very powerful and healing in so many ways.”Gradually, he realized that nothing was wrong with him, and he used this insight to unlock the play’s structure. Usher comes to find that his negative, self-effacing thinking is just a series of spiraling feelings that he has some amount of control over. Those thoughts tell a story, but it doesn’t mean that the story is true. Jackson’s two-decade process of writing “A Strange Loop” — and the many years he spent in therapy — helped him accept his own questing mind and the trouble it sometimes causes him. He’s someone who disdains orthodoxy, someone whose ex ghosted him after saying, “Wow, you’re really not a static thinker.”Stew, one of Jackson’s influences, told me that “A Strange Loop” is in a “continuum of Black art” that expresses how Black people “are complete people who have every possible thought that could be had.” Jackson himself, Stew said, is in another tradition. “I just felt like his work is so firmly in that line of Black disrupters, of generous disrupters. Artists that are willing to go beyond, you know, and sort of display themselves? I consider that a kind of generosity and a kind of bravery.” Jackson’s close friend Kisha Edwards-Gandsy spoke of the searching, restless quality of Jackson’s intelligence. “I feel what Michael asks everybody is, ‘If you think you know something, do you?’”Jackson, left, with Jaquel Spivey, who plays Usher in “A Strange Loop,” during rehearsals.Malike Sidibe for The New York TimesOne day in mid-March, I arrived in a Midtown Manhattan studio for Day 3 of rehearsals for “A Strange Loop.” The whole space felt like an extension of Jackson’s imagination: A miniature model of the Lyceum’s proscenium was situated in the background, along with a few props, including an empty Popeye’s chicken box. Jason Veasey, who plays Thought 5, wore a green shirt with “Detroit” across the front; Thought 3, John-​Michael Lyles, had on a T-shirt that read, “Stay weird and live free,” which could be Jackson’s motto.The group started rehearsing “Exile in Gayville,” a song about Usher’s relationship to dating apps and a nod to Phair’s “Exile in Guyville.” Jackson, the actors, the associate choreographer, Candace Taylor, and the show’s director, Stephen Brackett, made changes on the fly. “Can I advocate to make a tiny adjustment to get a little bit more quickly into the line?” Brackett asked about the pacing of the Thoughts’ reaction to Usher calling Beyoncé a “pop-​culture terrorist” (he was paraphrasing bell hooks). “If Beyoncé comes, I’m not going on,” Spivey joked.Later, Jackson and the show’s choreographer, Raja Feather Kelly, jokingly compared themselves to each other and to other Black artists.“If I position you as me in the downtown dance world and me as you,” Feather Kelly said, “in celebrity culture, we are Kanye West, because for so long, no one would give us any attention. And people were like, ‘It’s impossible what you’re doing.’”Jackson: “But does that mean we’re egomaniacs?”“I think we have to be,” Feather Kelly said, “I mean, by virtue of needing to be seen and heard.”“Who is our Pete Davidson? Who is our K.K.W.?” Jackson asked, and Feather Kelly whispered an answer in his ear.“No, no, no,” Jackson squealed.“I won’t say that out loud, but tell me I’m wrong,” Feather Kelly said, grinning.“I won’t tell you you’re wrong,” Jackson replied, cackling.The most interesting comparison Jackson identified was between himself and Tyler Perry, whose artistic work seems to exist at the opposite end of the spectrum from the playwright’s: Perry is a multimillionaire who boasts about producing films in five days, and Jackson, who is not wealthy, spent 20 years working on one project. In his dramedies, Perry often features Black archetypes without complicating them — the stalwart matriarch (exemplified in his Madea character); the “strong Black woman,” usually portrayed as unhappily lonely; the relative addicted to crack cocaine; the closeted gay Black man. Many of his gospel plays, TV shows and films feature a consistent message about the power of prayer.Perry’s work is referenced a few times in “A Strange Loop,” as a paragon of commercial success and an object of Usher’s ridicule. In one of the show’s most biting, farcical numbers, “Tyler Perry Writes Real Life,” Thoughts masquerading as notable Black historical figures like Harriet Tubman, Marcus Garvey, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston and someone called “Twelve Years a Slave” castigate him for disliking Perry’s work. Eventually, though, Usher relents to a Thought playing his agent and ghostwrites the ridiculously derivative gospel play, “Show Me How to Pray,” for Perry.Perry’s stage plays were a staple for Jackson’s mother, who’s still a fan — “If Tyler does it, she’s on it,” he told me. He always felt that Perry’s work wasn’t for him but really started to reject it after watching the 2013 film “Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor,” in which a young woman contracts H.I.V. after a period of sexual exploration. Jackson has loved ones who died of AIDS (“A Strange Loop” is dedicated to “all those Black gay boys I knew who chose to go on back to the Lord”) and knows other people still managing the illness. He found the film toxic and stigmatizing. Still, although Jackson thinks Perry’s work is “intellectually lazy,” he values the joy his Madea films and stage plays bring to his mother and other family members.One day in late February, Jackson and I sat down in the conference room of his production office to watch “A Madea Homecoming,” Perry’s latest Netflix feature, which premiered only days before. We could hardly get from one scene to the next without pausing the film to unpack some narrative error or slapdash prop. “These wigs are terrible … I mean, and consistently terrible … he just does not give a damn about the wig work,” Jackson said, with an air of resignation. “I wonder, do any of the actors think this is dumb, or are they all just excited to be there because it’s Tyler?” he asked.Although he lambastes what he calls Perry’s “simple-minded hack buffoonery,” he also worries he might be capable of something like it, deep down. While working on a horror film for A24, Jackson told me, he compiled a list of his fears to share with the film’s producers Ari Aster and Lars Knudsen. “This film is about my fears, and so I have to write all of them down. Even if those things don’t make it into the movie, they will be in the subtext of it.” One of his fears is that he’s not as advanced as he thinks he is, and that he might not be insulated from the kind of artistic foibles he criticizes Perry for. “Sometimes I worry that I’m a coon. That I think I’m this progressive, freethinking blah blah blah, but really I’m just a coon.” Jackson was referring to a worry shared by many introspective Black people that they are inadvertently performing for a white gaze. “Freedom starts in here,” he said, and pointed to his temple. “I don’t want to live in fear. I can’t live like that. I don’t have a man at home to hug up with. I have to wake up every day alone in my bed and get up out of bed and make something happen for myself. I don’t have generational wealth, I don’t have all this stuff, which means if I want to live, I have to be free.”He can even allow himself to embrace the little overlap that exists between him and Perry. Jackson, too, aspires to a kind of populism. “For me, I’m always trying to mix high and low, Black, white, whatever. That’s sort of what I’m interested in is like, everyone is invited to come into this. The piece can be as entertaining as it is intellectually challenging.” Of Perry, he said, adjusting his glasses, “To me, he’s like a right-wing artistic populism, and I’m more of a left-wing artistic populism. I think. I think. I’m making this up,” he finished, cautiously. “A Madea Homecoming” and its ilk make him “want to double down on what I’m doing, in trying to make art that is Black and nuanced and that doesn’t have sacred cows, that’s emotional, that’s intellectual, that’s silly, that’s all the things.”When Jackson won the Pulitzer, Perry called and playfully threatened to beat him up. Later, Perry texted Jackson a screen cap of the “Strange Loop” cast album as a gesture of support. Jackson texts Perry holiday greetings. The men’s polite acquaintanceship seems like a model for how to disagree about art.When I finally went to see the show, on a Saturday afternoon in April, I was surprised by how it destabilized me. I stumbled out of the theater bewildered, remembering the bawling of a man who sat behind me. Blinking in the sunlight, I eventually made contact with other wide-eyed women. “That was overwhelming,” one lady told me. “Now, it’s going to make me ask so many questions of my nephew. Like, oh, my God, what is your experience of our family, for real, for real?”At some point, I saw Jackson standing under the Lyceum marquee. I told him that I’d purchased a refrigerator magnet from the merch table, so that every time I walk by it, I can remind myself to question the narratives that run through my mind, my own strange loops. “We all have them,” he said. Right then we ran into a woman I’d met years ago; by sheer coincidence we had both been at the show. She asked Jackson if he planned to do a performance just for a Black, queer audience. He explained that he’s open to Black theater night, where Black people are specifically invited and encouraged to attend, but he didn’t want to do a “Blackout” night, where the audience is exclusively full of Black patrons. “I believe that it’s important to have as many people as possible with as many different perspectives as possible,” he told her.Later, on the phone, I asked him if he could elaborate. He’s OK with it if the audience is organically full of Black patrons, like if a church wanted to come and see it. “But I just struggle with the idea that like I’m supposed to create a quote-unquote all-Black space. And yet what I observe is that these all-Black spaces, to me, look like they all sort of come from the same class, and I don’t sense a ton of diversity within the Blackness, which then makes me question the intent of it. I could be looking at it in the wrong way, but I’ve seen the push for a lot of these events, and at the end of the day, they’re just not in the spirit of what I think ‘A Strange Loop’ really is, which is both Black and expansive.” He paused. “I’ve been asked in interviews recently, what do I want audiences to take away from the show, and my answer always is, ‘I want them to be thinking about themselves.’”The week before opening, Jackson shared with me a few lyrical tweaks he’d made during previews, to make a coda easier for the actors to sing, and to make it clear that his critique of Perry’s work is not a personal attack. But when the play officially opened on April 26, Jackson and company ceased being able to make any changes. The show had to “freeze.” I asked Jackson what it was like for a person who’s worked on a show for 20 years, whose creative philosophy is predicated on resisting being locked in, to freeze? He was sanguine about it, explaining that it’s part of the process. “I think the show is good regardless of whether I get every little thing that I want in there before we freeze, but I’m just trying to get it to be the best that it can be.”When I consider the heretofore living, breathing document of “A Strange Loop” frozen, I imagine Jackson holding notes for the next restaging, while also hoping the show goes on a long time — that whatever adjustments he has will be superseded by the revolutions in his thinking that will surely take place during its Broadway run, however long it is. The strange loops will continue. “I have a lot of opinions,” Jackson told me, “and my opinions change, and sometimes I don’t know, and sometimes I’m wrong.” He half smiled, showing the gap in his teeth. “But I feel like the world has made it so that, how can I just adhere to one thing?”Niela Orr is an essayist, a story producer for Pop-Up Magazine and a contributing editor for The Paris Review. She writes The Baffler’s Bread and Circuses column. More

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      Interview: Spinning A Tune With James Broadbent

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      James Broadbent on The Recollection of Tony Ward

      It can be the little things that grab our attention, making us eager to know more. In the case of The Recollection of Tony Ward it was simply the image of vinyl records, which along with the title, suggested that this was going to be a play about memories explored through a music collection. And that was enough to get the interest of one of our music obsessed team.

      So, we dropped the needle on our current favourite record (Fontains D.C.’s Skinty Fia just in case you were wondering), poured a couple of drinks and sat down with writer James Broadbent to find out more about the show that will play as part of May’s Peckham Fringe.

      The show follows a man who appears to be having a midlife crisis, divorced and forced to return to live with his mother – you’re clearly too young for this to be autobiographical, so what was the inspiration?

      Thanks for noting this is far from an autobiographical piece! It comes from a variety of places; the strongest of which being from when I worked in a record shop aged 17/18 – shout out to CrazyBeat Records in Upminster. I wasn’t writing at this point, and it was a simple Saturday job alongside plenty of my first experiences as a young adult.

      What struck me and inspired this piece I suppose were the customers themselves that came into the shop. How they found solace in a shop of used records and what was happening outside of the shop’s doors didn’t seem to matter. Most Saturdays were a blast and I think about them often but stepping outside I was always reminded of the strange expectation and traps of suburbia. That’s what this is all about really; traps and lessons.

      You’re bang on! Tony finds himself back at his mother’s house and while sitting alone he remembers that his record collection must be somewhere in the very house. It’s a little bit more freeform than: ‘This record reminds me of this’. Tony Ward, the protagonist, seems to be in the quietest place he’s been for a while, and this brings out an awful lot from within him.

      We’ve really tried to utilise the stage and lighting design in Tony’s journey through his youth. For a subject manner that can come across as self-pitying and defeatist it’s these memories that personally are my favourite part of the play – of the writing anyway- how Tony relishes in these moments of the past with his best friends and I really hope that the audience revels in them too.

      It’s also not all positive and yearning for the past either; Tony faces difficult memories within his marriage and experience as a father that Tal (The performer) is doing wonders with.

      So is music an important part of your life, is it an area you’d want to explore more in your writing?

      Music is an incredibly important part of my life. My older brother, Matthew, is a tremendous musician who has been writing and performing since I was around about ten. I remember my Dad bartering with bouncers at the Water Rats in Camden to let me in with him to watch because I was so underage. After this I’ve always surrounded myself with musicians as they’re always the funniest people. I’m happiest when I’m listening to new music, and I tend to write a lot more when I do too.

      This accompanied by my experience in CrazyBeat and core memories being formed at gigs and festivals with my closest friends. It’s something I love exploring in my writing too. One of my personal highlights from my previous show was seeing the audience bob and clap along to the dance routine performed at the end of the show. I want to reach that level of energy again and music is the only thing that really brings that side out of people.

      The play looks at identity and how we find our own; is this a theme you explore often, and how do you make it authentic when you aren’t anywhere near middle aged yet?

      I feel as though identity is something you are challenged with consistently in your adult life and the mistakes you make along the way. The play goes from Tony’s teenage years to the present day and there are plenty of mistakes in his lifetime. His biggest mistake for sure is the refusal to learn from any of them and that’s where the commentary on the past fifty years comes in – people believe they don’t have time for themselves because everything is moving so fast and that’s nobody’s fault, but I’m a strong believer we can always become better people. This theme is consistently challenged in my writing because I know that everybody struggles with the same big questions – ‘who am I and how do I fit into it all?’ and myself like plenty of others tend to avoid questions like these and put something on the TV for noise. 

      Making it authentic has been easier than I had envisioned. It’s not entirely naturalistic so that helps and working with an actor in Tal Profs who has been through similar life experiences to Tony has meant that he’s been able to bring an awful lot to the role. I’m nowhere near being middle-aged but the play isn’t about age really – but about proving who you are – even if that is just to yourself. Nothing more authentic than that.

      The show is part of Peckham Fringe, are such festivals a vital step in developing shows?

      Fringe festivals or shows off the beaten track of any form are the best ways to experience new art. Personally, I’ve no aspiration for anything to end up on the West End or even on screen and some people might disagree with this, but at this moment in time I think Fringe Festivals hold far more excitement than anything Between Charing Cross and Tottenham Court Road.

      Peckham Fringe is a wonderful festival, where I plan to see a dozen or so shows because you have people who, like ourselves, are working within difficult budget and time restraints but what is so clear to see is the love behind every show that is put on at these festivals.

      I think they help develop shows but perhaps in a different sense, you have companies that put themselves under enormous amounts of pressure to make something they never would have done if it wasn’t for the prospect of a show to fifty people at the end of it. The shows themselves take on new forms and cast and crew learn so much from these opportunities, so it’s great they exist and are popping up in new forms like Peckham Fringe.

      Your last show, Lovely Spread played at Camden Fringe, when you self-produced, was that a good learning curve for you?

      Such a learning curve. That was made with a very talented group of people who I can’t wait to work with again because we faced so many obstacles (covid relating and otherwise) and we overcame them together. Even six months after ‘Lovely Spread’ I know what I’d change and how I’d go about it and that’s not off the table now for another company or student production to take it and do it differently.

      I learned how important marketing is, how to make those who create and facilitate your show happy by having open lines of communication and finally I learned that my writing is good enough and trusting talented people is the key to success – so stop worrying about it all and have fun.

      What is it you hope audiences will walk away talking about when they see The Recollection of Tony Ward?

      I don’t know really. Theatrically I undeniably want people to walk away thinking that it was a step up in production value from Lovely Spread in terms of staging, lighting and sound design – they’ll see the choices we made, and they’ll have things to say on all that.

      Emotionally, it’s a strange bit of work that some people will resonate with, and some won’t. I suppose I want people to walk away from the show thinking about who they are and why that doesn’t feel enough. How being unspectacular can be the most wonderful thing if we learn to accept ourselves and learn from our mistakes.

      On reflection, I kind of don’t want anybody to talk about ‘The Recollection of Tony Ward’ but I’d like to think it would stay with them when they have a moment alone.

      And it’s on for just one day, with two performances, that clearly isn’t going to be all, have you got plans in place for where the show goes next then?

      Thanks for your optimism! We have a few festival slots booked in for later in the summer which I’m very excited about but they’ve yet to be announced – but keep an eye out. Hopefully that time round we’ll have an entirely different team because it will take the show in a new direction and grow in ways I could never even foresee.

      Thanks to James for taking time out to chat to us. The Recollection Of Tony Ward plays at Theatre Peckham on 8 May, with performances at 2.30 and 8.00. Further information and tickets can be found here. More

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      Holland Taylor Plays Ann Richards One Last Time

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      Taylor, 79, first performed her solo play “Ann,” about the former governor of Texas, in 2010. Now, she’s saying goodbye to the white suit.The actress Holland Taylor had long been a fan of Ann Richards, the Democratic firebrand and former governor of Texas, and so she was “strangely overcome,” as she put it, when Richards died in 2006.“I was in mourning for months and months,” Taylor said. “I wanted to do something creative about her to use these feelings, and it just came to me in a flood that I was going to write a play about her and I was going to perform it. It was aberrant behavior for me: I am a supremely practical person, but I launched into this at 65 or [6]8 or something, absolutely blind to any of the pitfalls, any of the dangers, any of the impossibilities.”After a few years of extensive research, Taylor first performed her solo play, “Ann” (its title at the time was “Money, Marbles and Chalk”), in 2010 at the Grand 1894 Opera House in Galveston, Texas. Several productions followed, including one on Broadway that earned her a Tony nomination in 2013.“She’s not a Texan, but I think she captured the part of Texas that I am proud of — that kind of iconoclastic, funny, laconic storytelling,” said Julie White, who was raised in the Lone Star State and recorded the lines delivered by Richards’s assistant Nancy that we hear in the show.Holland slipped into Richards’s drawl and her tailored white suit for the last time during a monthlong run of the one-woman show at the Pasadena Playhouse that concluded this past Sunday. (A version of the play recorded at ZACH Theater in Austin, Texas, can be streamed on PBS and BroadwayHD.)Two days after her final performance as Richards, Taylor, 79, in a video conversation from her Los Angeles home, spoke about dark jokes, the stress of closing performances and the meaning of politics. These are edited excerpts from video and email conversations.“When you say ‘politics’ in our culture today, it has kind of a negative tone to it,” Taylor said.Alex Welsh for The New York TimesDid you ever consider including other people in “Ann”?No, because it is not a play that takes place in time — I never thought of it as being about events. I imagined the circumstances and the dialogue, but the play is very true. In the back of my mind, this is a visitation. This is what the theater allows: The theater allows you to do any [expletive] thing you want.Up to a point, since you were writing in character, based on a real person.Well, 95 percent of this play — the words, the language, the sayings — are totally my invention. So many lines emerge from the pudding of stuff in one’s brain from research. I know a joke that she told on the morning of 9/11 that was so dark. I said to the person who told me that, “Wow, that’s almost gothic.” And that person said, “Nothing was off-limits for her.” So I wrote a joke that was equally shocking. I know what she would say in given circumstances and my own ability to write funny stuff was in some way absolutely elevated. What I wrote for her is funnier than anything I could ever write for myself.Did you ever think about using more of her own words?What would be the point of that? It wasn’t like she was Abraham Lincoln. She was a very accessible speaker — even her greatest speeches are very conversational, and they’re tied to her kind of homespun, hardscrabble roots. There’s probably 10 sentences that I sliver in, like, for instance, “Why should your life be just about you?” How simple is that?How did you approach the Pasadena run?One of the reasons I did it was, I’ve always worn so many hats and had to work so hard during every production. With Broadway, the work I had to do was not onstage: There’s no one who can do press for the show but me. I’m the only actor, and also the creator behind the whole production in every way. And so on Broadway I barely had time to think, and I was executing the play at the highest level I could. Because I was not doing many other chores this time around, I thought, At last I will deal with this text as an actress. I really explored how she gets from this flagstone to the next flagstone to the lily pond to the bridge to the puddle to the stone — jumping from thing to thing. Because to have written a play is not to have prepared to perform it at all. Very different tasks.Has “Ann” changed the way you think about politics?This show is really not about politics at all.But at the end, for example, she talks about government and public service, which is — or should be — a key aspect of politics.I think it’s about participation. When you say “politics” in our culture today, it has kind of a negative tone to it. She had a practical sense of how things worked; she wanted people to be involved in their lives, where they had agency. You’re giving a [expletive] about what happens around you and to other people. So it’s all about participation: “If you don’t participate, you’re jus’ lettin’ other people make some big ol’ decisions for you.” That was political in that sense. Absolutely.What was it like to perform in front of masked audiences?It’s daunting at first but believe me, while I’m performing I have a lot of things on my mind. And I had been living for months in surgical wrapping: I was terrified of getting Covid, not for my own health but that I would shut down the production. So I had a lot of generalized anxiety and from the minute I agreed to do this, I lived behind a mask. Each day would go by and I’d say, “One more down.” We made it through and my relief was just immeasurable from not having that show close.How did the last performance go?I found the last day very stressful. Final performances have so much riding on them. I myself would never go to see an actor’s last performance, the same way I try to avoid going to opening nights, because I feel the actors’ anxiety. Openings and closings are so stressful, they’re just hard. But I think it went very, very well. People said so. I felt complete.So this was really the last rodeo for “Ann”?I could have a pang, I suppose, and maybe I will, but I don’t think I’ll ever say, “Gee, I wish I could do it again.” I am turning 80 this winter and what I do in this show is unquestionably the hardest thing I’ve ever done onstage. I don’t have that kind of confidence in my constitution any longer to say, “I’ll do another one of that.” Learning the text takes me two hours every day with someone on FaceTime, six days a week, for two months. To do this again means I have to carve five months out of my life, and there is no five months like that I can carve out of my life. A wonderful producer-director asked me on Instagram how I feel, and I said “satisfied.” I’ve achieved what I wanted to achieve. More

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      ‘Cost of Living’ Will Come to Broadway This Fall

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      Manhattan Theater Club will stage the Martyna Majok play, which explores disability and caregiving, at its Samuel J. Friedman Theater.Martyna Majok’s “Cost of Living,” a play that explores disability and caregiving and which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2018, will be staged on Broadway this fall.Manhattan Theater Club, one of the four nonprofits that operate Broadway houses, said it would stage a production of the play at its Samuel J. Friedman Theater this fall.The play has two parallel plots, one about a man with cerebral palsy and his hired caregiver, and the other about a double amputee and her estranged husband. The Pulitzer board described the play as “An honest, original work that invites audiences to examine diverse perceptions of privilege and human connection.”Manhattan Theater Club previously staged the play, in 2017, at its Off Broadway space at New York City Center, where it won praise from the New York Times critic Jesse Green, who wrote, “If you don’t find yourself in someone onstage in ‘Cost of Living,’ you’re not looking.”The Broadway production, like the Off Broadway production, will be directed by Jo Bonney, and it will feature two of the same performers, Gregg Mozgala and Katy Sullivan.In 2018, the Williamstown Theater Festival, which staged the first production of the play, said it had commissioned a musical adaptation from Michael John LaChiusa; a Williamstown spokesman said those plans are now “on hold.” More

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      Interview: Welcome To The Land of OSO

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      Author: Everything Theatre

      in Features and Interviews, Podcasts, Runn Radio interview

      28 April 2022

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      Ian McFarlane on new show Forever Oz

      We met Ian McFarlane back in 2020 when we spoke to him about Revellers Society. He is now back with Forever Oz, which, as the title suggests, is based on L. Frank Baum’s series of books from which The Wizard Of Oz came. But rest assured, this is not a new stage adaptation of the film we all know and love, but instead is based on the second and third books in the series, along with some adaptations by Ian himself.

      Ian’s love of not just the Oz books, but Peter Pan are clear to hear as he tells us about the show and why his theatre company is called Big Adventure Productions. Plus we discuss why he the show will be playing at Barnes OSO Arts Centre before hopefully a tour.

      Forever Oz plays at OSO Arts Centre 19 – 22 May. Further information and bookings here. More