Theater

Gerald S. Krone, a theater manager and producer who in 1967 joined with Douglas Turner Ward and Robert Hooks to found the Negro Ensemble Company, a New York theater troupe that championed black writers, actors and themes in what was then a largely white theatrical landscape, died on Feb. 20 at his home in Philadelphia. He was 86.His longtime partner, Ivan Kaminoff, said the cause was Parkinson’s disease.Mr. Krone, who was managing various Off Broadway theaters at the time, brought administrative savvy to the new enterprise, while Mr. Hooks, an actor and producer, and Mr. Ward, an actor and playwright, concentrated on the creative side. Mr. Krone stood out in the partnership because he was white.Black activism was gaining a new militance in the second half of the 1960s, and before long the company, which took up residence at St. Marks Playhouse in the East Village, was drawing criticism over, among other things, the participation of Mr. Krone and other white people.“We were damned for not being in Harlem,” Mr. Ward wrote in a 1968 essay in The New York Times defending the company at the end of its first season, “accused of conspiring against black playwrights, judged traitorous for hiring a few white people, and stigmatized with a host of other mortal and venial sins negating our right to be called a black theater.”Criticism notwithstanding, the partnership enjoyed quick success, and the Negro Ensemble Company went on to send three plays to Broadway: “The River Niger” in 1973, “The First Breeze of Summer” in 1975 and “Home” in 1980. In 1981 it staged, Off Broadway, the premiere of Charles Fuller’s “A Soldier’s Play,” with a cast that included Denzel Washington and Samuel L. Jackson; the play won the Pulitzer Prize.Less than two years after it was founded, the company received a special Tony Award, which Mr. Ward and Mr. Krone were on hand to accept. After Mr. Ward spoke, Mr. Krone addressed the audience, thanking his black colleagues “for being courageous enough — in this rather difficult, confusing, disturbing time — for being courageous enough to give me, a white man, an opportunity to be part of a very important, dynamic, wonderful black theater, which is theirs.”Gerald Sidney Krone was born on Feb. 25, 1933, in Memphis to Irving and Eva Sauer Krone. He grew up in Memphis and attended Hume High School, where Elvis Presley was a class or two behind him; Mr. Krone once served as M.C. at a school event and introduced Presley, Mr. Kaminoff said.Mr. Krone served in the Army during the Korean War, then graduated from Washington University in St. Louis. He served an internship with the Royal Shakespeare Company.For a time he was married to Dorothy Olim, and they were business partners as well, working on theater productions in management capacities as well as forming Krone-Olim Advertising. The marriage ended in divorce.Mr. Hooks met Mr. Krone and Ms. Olim when they were all involved in a production at the Cherry Lane Theater in 1964. When Mr. Hooks decided to produce two of Mr. Ward’s one-act plays, “Happy Ending” and “Day of Absence,” the next year at St. Marks, he asked them to serve as managers.The production generated buzz, and in the aftermath Mr. Ward wrote a provocative essay in The New York Times that bore the headline “American Theater: For Whites Only?”“Despite an eminent handful,” he wrote, “Negro dramatists remain sparse in number, productions sporadic at most, and scripts too few to indicate discernible trends.”The article caught the attention of the Ford Foundation, which asked Mr. Hooks and Mr. Ward to meet to discuss a possible grant.“Having Gerald right there as our general manager and numbers man, we asked him to come with us,” Mr. Hooks recalled in a telephone interview. The foundation asked for a proposal that would advance black theater; Mr. Krone was instrumental in drawing it up and securing a $1.5 million grant, which got the Negro Ensemble Company started.“We were in the right place at the right time and were able to create a movement,” Mr. Hooks said, “and Gerald was a big part of that.”The funding financed a company of 13 actors, workshops and a four-play season the first year. Mr. Ward was the artistic director, Mr. Hooks the executive director and Mr. Krone the administrative director. The first production, Peter Weiss’s “Song of the Lusitanian Bogey,” opened in January 1968.Once its Ford Foundation money ran out, the company faced occasional financial crises. Mr. Krone remained as administrative director until 1982, when he left to work in television news, though he remained on the board of directors for some years.In addition to Mr. Kaminoff, whom he married in 2013 after two decades together, Mr. Krone is survived by a brother, Norman.The Negro Ensemble Company continues today with workshops and intermittent productions. In 2016 the company staged a revival of “Day of Absence,” one of the plays that brought the three founders together in 1965.“The N.E.C. served its purpose,” Mr. Hooks said, “and is still serving its purpose.” More

Our guide to plays and musicals coming to New York stages and a few last-chance picks of shows that are about to close. Our reviews of open shows are at nytimes.com/reviews/theater.Previews & Openings‘COAL COUNTRY’ at the Public Theater (in previews; opens on March 3). In 2010, a thousand feet underground in West Virginia, coal dust exploded, killing 29 of the 31 miners on site. The documentary playwrights Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen interviewed survivors and family members, learning how a community reckons with disaster and loss. Steve Earle supplies original music. Blank directs a cast that includes Mary Bacon and Michael Laurence.212-967-7555, publictheater.org‘COMPANY’ at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater (previews start on March 2; opens on March 22). Phone rings, door chimes and in comes a gender-bent version of the beloved Stephen Sondheim musical, with a book by George Furth. Marianne Elliot’s production, which originated in London, arrives with the Tony-winner Katrina Lenk as the bachelorette Bobbie, with Patti LuPone as the heavy-drinking, heavy-singing Joanne. 212-239-6200, companymusical.com‘DIANA: A TRUE MUSICAL STORY’ at the Longacre Theater (previews start on March 2; opens on March 31). The people’s princess comes to New York. Joe DiPietro and David Bryan’s musical, which debuted at La Jolla Playhouse, recreates the not-so-happily-ever-after fairytale of Prince Charles (Roe Hartrampf) and Princess Di (Jeanna de Waal). With Judy Kaye as Elizabeth II. Christopher Ashley directs, with choreography by Kelly Devine.212-239-6200, thedianamusical.com‘THE FRE’ at the Flea Theater (previews start on Feb. 28; opens on March 15). Having brought a dancing-penis kickline to Broadway, Taylor Mac has now sunk low. In this new work, set in and around a mud pit, a young aesthete tries to persuade his grubby hedonists to de-ooze. In this show, directed by Niegel Smith, “audiences will literally and figuratively jump into the mud,” the theater warns. 212-226-0051, theflea.org‘GIRL FROM THE NORTH COUNTRY’ at the Belasco Theater (in previews; opens on March 5). This Bob Dylan jukebox musical, written and directed by Conor McPherson, now knocks on Broadway’s door. Set in a boardinghouse in Duluth, Minn., in 1934, it centers on various down-at-heart, down-at-heel residents. Ben Brantley wrote, “What’s created, through songs written by Mr. Dylan over half a century, is a climate of feeling, as pervasive and evasive as fog.”212-239-6200, northcountryonbroadway.com[embedded content]‘HANGMEN’ at the Golden Theater (previews start on Feb. 28; opens on March 19). Martin McDonagh’s morbid comedy flings its noose around Broadway’s neck. In Matthew Dunster’s production, Dan Stevens (“Downton Abbey,” “Legion”) takes over the role originated by Johnny Flynn. When it ran Off Broadway, “Hangmen” was described by Ben Brantley as “criminally enjoyable” and “a juicy tale of capital punishment and other forms of retribution.”212-239-6200, hangmenbroadway.com‘THE HOT WING KING’ at the Pershing Square Signature Center (in previews; opens on March 1). A saucy comedy, Katori Hall’s new play, part of her Signature Theater residency, unfolds during the Hot Wang Festival in Memphis, with family and romantic conflict cooking alongside the chicken. Steve H. Broadnax III directs a cast that includes Toussaint Jeanlouis and Korey Jackson. 212-244-7529, signaturetheatre.org‘THE PERPLEXED’ at New York City Center Stage I (in previews; opens on March 3). Before Richard Greenberg goes to the ballgame with the Broadway revival of “Take Me Out,” he premieres this uptown comedy about two families, alike in indignity, and the wedding that unites them. For Manhattan Theater Club, Lynne Meadow directs a cast that includes Margaret Colin and Frank Wood.212-581-1212, nycitycenter.org‘SANCTUARY CITY’ at the Lucille Lortel Theater (previews start on March 4; opens on March 24). Life could be a dream — with permanent residency status. In this new New York Theater Workshop play from the Pulitzer Prize winner Martyna Majok, young immigrants, documented and otherwise, fight for citizenship and survival. Jasai Chase-Owens, Sharlene Cruz and Austin Smith star. Rebecca Frecknall directs.212-460-5475, nytw.org‘WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF’ at the Booth Theater (previews start on March 3; opens on April 2). Who’s afraid of Laurie Metcalf? Over the past few years, Metcalf, a longtime Steppenwolf member and a sitcom star, has made a home on Broadway. In Edward Albee’s martial, marital comedy she stars opposite Rupert Everett, with Patsy Ferran and Russel Tovey as the gettable guests. Joe Mantello directs.212-239-6200, virginiawoolfonbroadway.com[Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead.]Last Chance‘GRAND HORIZONS’ at the Hayes Theater (closes on March 1). Bess Wohl’s comedy of divorce, directed by Leigh Silverman, calls it quits. Jesse Green questioned the wisdom of writing “a boulevard comedy for a cul-de-sac age.” However, he had particular praise for Jane Alexander, writing that “you haven’t lived until you’ve heard a woman who once played Eleanor Roosevelt sing the praises of cunnilingus.”2st.com‘MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON’ at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater (closes on Feb. 29). Rona Munro’s adaptation of Elizabeth Strout’s glimmering 2016 novel, directed by Richard Eyre and starring a scarf-wrapped Laura Linney, reaches its final paragraphs. Ben Brantley wrote that “as embodied with middle-American forthrightness” by Linney, the play’s title character “may be the most translucent figure now on a New York stage.” 212-239-6200, manhattantheatreclub.com‘HAMLET’ at St. Ann’s Warehouse (closes on March 8). Ruth Negga’s sweet prince bids his final good night as Yaël Farber’s shadowed version of Shakespeare’s tragedy closes. In an admiring review, Ben Brantley wrote that Negga “has created a portrait of the theater’s most endlessly analyzed prince that is drawn in lines of lightning.”718-254-8779, stannswarehouse.org More

LONDON — Before we get to the apocalypse implicit in the title of “Death of England,” Clint Dyer and Roy Williams’s furious play at the National Theater through March 7, spare a thought for the vocal cords of its tireless lone performer, Rafe Spall.Spewing 100 minutes of frequently enraged reports from the front line of grief, Spall is asked to sustain a level of vitriol that must be as wearing on his larynx as it risks becoming for the audience. Playing Michael, a verbally uninhibited Londoner in mourning for a father whom he loved, but whose pro-Brexit politics he found abhorrent, Spall animates a racially fractious landscape with a near-maniacal vigor that I’ve not seen before from this gentlest-seeming of actors.“Death of England” comes from two of Britain’s leading black theater practitioners (Dyer doubles as the director) and is an expansion of a micro-play first commissioned from Williams by the Royal Court Theater and the Guardian newspaper in 2014. In the Dorfman Theater at the National, the stage takes the shape of a St. George’s Cross that cuts through the audience, allowing Spall’s Michael to interact with playgoers at random (“Did you drop something?” he asks a spectator early on) even as he tells us he is talking through the hazy filter of drugs and booze.Performed without an interval, the production gains visual energy from the sudden appearance of props, embedded in cubbyholes to the side of the set: a roast dinner here, a record album or two there. Through it all, Michael attempts to accommodate the memory of a man about whom he feels as divided as the country in the play’s title.The narrative may not always add up: Michael’s father is revealed to have had a secret life in the company of a local Indian restaurateur, Riz, the details of which aren’t remotely plausible: Would this man really be seeking literary sustenance with the also-unseen Riz in the predawn hours? The ending, too, takes a lurch toward the sentimental that Michael, of all people, would surely resist. But you have to hand it to the creative team — not least the hardworking sound designers Pete Malkin and Benjamin Grant — for carrying a full-on assault of this sort straight across the finish line, to co-opt the language of sports deployed by the play.Credibility poses a more significant problem in a longer, more populous play, “The Haystack,” which has been extended at the Hampstead Theater in North London through March 12. Marking the full-length playwriting debut of Al Blyth, the production is the first at this address from the Hampstead’s artistic director, Roxana Silbert, who acceded to her post last fall.Telling of a surveillance state in which our every move is monitored, the careering narrative devolves into a nasty revenge drama, by which point you’ve lost sympathy for both the hotshot intelligence expert Neil (Oliver Johnstone) and the emotionally damaged journalist, Cora (Rona Morison), on whom he alights first professionally and then romantically. She, for her part, gives scant respect to professional benchmarks like fact-checking and attribution.It’s a measure of clunky dramaturgy when a play resorts to lapsing into direct address for no other reason but to impart information or gain a spurious relevance. At one point, we’re given a vivid recapitulation of recent terror attacks in London that only distracts from the tortured courtship at the play’s core. The play takes its title, you guessed it, from the proverbial image of a needle in a haystack, but at a running time of nearly three hours, “The Haystack” is at least one bale too many. Compression, not to mention more logical plotting, would seem to be the noninvasive remedy here.What happens when the world at large simply proves too much? One answer is on compelling view in “Collapsible,” an hourlong play that was a hit at last summer’s Edinburgh Festival. The director Thomas Martin’s keen-eyed production has been extended until March 21 at the Bush Theater, the West London venue devoted to new writing that is on a roll between this and the New York-bound “Baby Reindeer.”The cunning design by Alison Neighbour tips you off to the precarious state of the internet-addicted Esther, or Essie, whom we find perched atop a plinth of sorts from which she seems about to tumble. (The stage floor looks like gravel but is in fact a mix of various materials including charcoal and cork.) Having lost both a job and a partner, Essie lets rip with a fusillade of language to match Michael’s in “Death of England,” the difference being that Breffni Holahan’s Essie speaks even faster than Spall, if more quietly. The Bush’s studio space seats only 60, which allows for greater intimacy.Essie’s thirst for news — “the planet bucking like a horse trying to throw us all off and out into space,” as she describes the state of things — provides a daily catalog of woe writ small as well as large. A Sky television modem, we’re wryly informed midway through a litany of far more terrible disasters, has not yet arrived. Margaret Perry, the play’s Irish writer, keeps the images pouring forth in a lava flow of language that the superb Holahan navigates with confidence.There’s a dark comedy to be found in Essie’s various job interviews, as well as her reckoning with friends and family, from whom she is forever requesting the one word that might best describe her before she slips into a mental abyss. “Smart,” replies her father. “That’s your ration of compliments for the year.”Both author and performer achieve a neat trick in the closing moments that shouldn’t be revealed here beyond a change in perspective that catches the audience unawares. That is followed by a haunting exchange of the word “OK,” though whether Essie or the world she inhabits really is remains movingly up for grabs.Death of England. Directed by Clint Dyer. National Theater / Dorfman, through March 7.The Haystack. Directed by Roxana Silbert. Hampstead Theater, through March 12.Collapsible. Directed by Thomas Martin. Bush Theater, through March 21. More

Late in the evening, as the rest of the household sleeps, a woman tells her middle-aged son about the one who got away — the man she longed for throughout her marriage, whom she once sneaked off with overnight, leaving her children alone at home.In “Grand Horizons,” Bess Wohl’s clever truth bomb of a play, it is a scene that makes the Broadway audience roar. Nancy, a retired librarian played by Jane Alexander, has just asked her husband of 50 years for a divorce.Their son Brian, played by Michael Urie, is shellshocked by the split. His mother’s confession, sprinkled with explicit details that he is desperate not to hear, is a way of explaining to him that her passion was always elsewhere.“Mom, please,” he says, “I’m begging you.”But she won’t be stopped, and it’s terrific comedy: her unperturbed insistence, his escalating agony. Wohl is tapping a reflex, inviting us to enjoy the easy scandal of a proper, older woman being sexual, using raunchy words. And Nancy is accustomed to being laughed at by her grown-up boys — condescended to, affectionately minimized.Then, bam, she has had enough.“No,” she tells Brian. “You have to hear this. I will be a whole person to you. I will.”That bold, quick-change moment of asserted dignity is when I swooned for “Grand Horizons,” which for all its plot about a marriage’s unforeseen implosion has another matter urgently on its mind. Like Kate Hamill’s delicious “Dracula,” a feminist romp at Classic Stage Company, Wohl’s play is a powerful argument for the full humanity of women in our culture — a matter that’s not as settled as we might like to think.Nancy, for one, belongs to a generation of women raised to care-take and accommodate, never to make a fuss about themselves. She reminds me my aunt, who, riding shotgun on a road trip, temporarily lost her sight in one eye. Not wanting to trouble my uncle as he drove, she made not a peep about it. Nancy, I imagine, might have done the same.When she was a child learning how to canoe, Nancy says, her father taught her to “never to take my paddle out of the water, forward and back, forward and back, so that I wouldn’t even make the smallest splash, the tiniest sound. And now I think I lived my entire life that way — no splash. No impact.”“Grand Horizons” is the story of her comparatively clamorous awakening, in which she finds an ally in Jess, her heavily pregnant daughter-in-law. Jess looks at Nancy and glimpses a terrifying, imminent future in which she is viewed only as a mother — her own needs and desires permanently subjugated in a way that her husband’s will never be.The stuff of nightmares, of course, varies for each of us. But Jess would be right at home in the audience for “Dracula,” whose 19th-century women feel a more inchoate version of her fear. The world they inhabit in this loose, rollicking adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel is frightening precisely because it’s not so different from our own.The title page of the script calls it “A bit of a feminist revenge fantasy, really,” and that’s exactly how this female-centric reinvention feels. It scares us not with monsters, though it certainly has those, but with the sinister prospect of women’s dehumanization at the hands of men empowered by law and intractable custom.Its threats are both supernatural — Dracula, the bloodsucking Transylvanian traditionalist — and mortal: everyday Englishmen.“Your man can lock you away for being mad, you know,” cautions Renfield, a Dracula devotee written here as an Englishwoman who has indeed been locked away. “And they say what madness is! They define all the words! They make all the rules — and they don’t let you break them. And they try to break you if you try!”If, for the 21st century, her warning is not quite factually spot-on, it carries a certain metaphorical heft.True, Renfield (played by Hamill) is possessed of drolly alarming appetites; when she asks Seward, her doctor, for a “plump, juicy, crunchy little kitten,” she’s not hoping for a playmate. But this patient, a onetime poet, does seem to have cracked under the constraints of a world that demanded her submission to a cruel husband.A tale of domestic horrors — and perhaps an egalitarian manifesto, too, by a playwright who got married during previews — Hamill’s “Dracula” is about the expectation that women will bend themselves to the rigid frame of ladylike behavior, no matter how it deforms them. They mustn’t be brainy, lest their menfolk feel slighted; they mustn’t be willful; and they surely mustn’t let too much of their real personalities show.When a grieving Seward buries his fiancée, Lucy, he says: “She will be laid to rest, in peace, as she lived — an angel, beyond any reproach!”“An angel?” her best friend, Mina, erupts. “Lucy was vulgar — and funny — and clever — and complicated. She was not some porcelain idol for you to worship! You didn’t even know her.”What’s so offensive to Mina is that this intended compliment, calling Lucy an angel, is in fact a denial of her very humanity. Mina herself, in the meantime, is pregnant and thus assumed by those around her to be in a diminished state — physically delicate and mentally frail. One outlier: the vampire-hunting physician Van Helsing, a woman who takes no guff from anyone and taps Mina as a kindred spirit.If Mina suffers from any condition, it’s being female in a society designed and run by men, for men. She and Van Helsing do fight back, and they notch a win. Which is what makes this fantasy so much fun — because in the real world, theater being no exception, men still hold outsize power.So many plays, including whole acres of Shakespeare, are about struggles for dominance. “Grand Horizons” and “Dracula” wage a more elemental battle: to grant women their full personhood — not lesser than, but equal to.“You cannot tear down all of the old ways alone,” Dracula says menacingly.Wohl and Hamill are not alone, though. And those old ways are crumbling. More

Let us survey the many moods of Molly Brown: She is perky, chirpy, spunky, bubbly, cheerful. Even stranded on a raft after the Titanic sinks, she can’t help being, ahem, buoyant.The resilient heroine of the Meredith Willson musical “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” was always an upbeat go-getter, with an action-packed journey that took her from a hardscrabble Rockies mining town to the Denver upper crust. But the Transport Group revival that just opened at Abrons Arts Center has turned Molly (played by Beth Malone, a Tony nominee for “Fun Home”) into a human exclamation mark. The production is simultaneously busy and lifeless — a feat of sorts, if not a desirable one.The 1960 show was Willson’s follow-up to “The Music Man,” and lightning did not strike twice: There was a Hollywood adaptation four years later, but the stage steered clear, and “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” doesn’t appear to have been revived on Broadway or Off in nearly 60 years.The choreographer/director Kathleen Marshall and the book writer/lyricist Dick Scanlan must have seen an opportunity to give vintage material a fresh start, so they went back to the drawing board: According to the production notes, “none of the characters in the 2020 version appear in the 1960 version. Both have characters called Molly, but she says and does different things. The two versions share three lines of dialogue.”Fewer than half the songs are from the original show, including the fine “I Ain’t Down Yet” and “Belly Up to the Bar, Boys.” The rest are pulled from Willson’s catalog with a mix of tweaked and entirely new lyrics by Scanlan. (This revisal has been in the works for about 10 years, with productions in Denver and St. Louis.)The title character is based on the actual Molly Brown (1867-1932), though both Scanlan and his predecessor, Richard Morris, have played fast and loose with the facts. Which is fine, since musicals tend to believe that if the legend becomes fact, it’s best to sing the legend.The problem is that Scanlan and Marshall give us a one-note dynamo whose needle never leaves a positively aggressive red zone.Molly, née Tobin, is now a fearless, progressive woman speaking truth to power. The tone is set when, facing an all-male Senate hearing in an introductory scene, she is told, “You have been warned, nevertheless you persist: Settle down.”That is how the show rolls: with all the subtlety of a Hummer.And there is plenty more where that came from in this protracted tale of resilient feminist pluck.Newly arrived in Leadville, Colo., the young Molly wins over the local workers; befriends a pregnant widow, Julia (Whitney Bashor); and ends up marrying J.J. Brown, the manager of a silver mine (David Aron Damane).“I can be anyone I wanna be, why not be a queen?” Molly muses. She and J.J. don’t achieve royal status, but they do strike it rich. Her folksy, rough-hewed attitude appalls Denver’s ladies who lunch until — you guessed it — she charms them, with an assist from some spiked tea.And so it goes. Molly becomes a women’s suffrage activist. Molly fights for workers’ rights and helps the needy (“Why shouldn’t one of Denver’s ‘better families’ help Denver’s families do better?,” she says).Although Malone almost never leaves the stage, she is not given much to work with by either Scanlan or Marshall and compensates with unbridled “I’m auditioning for Peter Pan” enthusiasm.Eventually Molly learns J.J. had an affair (which took place offstage, lest the audience be subjected to anything vaguely resembling moral ambiguity or dramatic stakes) and decamps to Europe. Neither the decadent old continent nor the Titanic can bring her down, however. Soon she’s back in New York, where she stands up for an indigent immigrant whose entry is blocked by an immigration officer, while a repentant J.J. waits in the wings. You may never have yearned so much for a show’s heroine to calm down, even for a second.The Unsinkable Molly BrownThrough March 22 at Abrons Arts Center, Manhattan; 866-811-4111, transportgroup.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

When the cast of “To Kill a Mockingbird” filed into the arena on Wednesday, wearing suits and dresses reminiscent of Alabama in the 1930s, the crowd erupted as if the actors were Knicks coming out of the locker room.When Atticus Finch asked a barrage of tough questions of Mayella Ewell, the white teenager who had accused a black man of rape, they burst into applause, as if the tide had turned in the game. And when Scout Finch, one of the play’s central narrators, called out the man behind a white Ku Klux Klan hood, the crowd oohed as if their team had stolen back the ball.For the first time, Madison Square Garden opened its doors to Broadway, and with it came 18,000 New York City public school students and chaperones to watch a play that has only ever been performed on the Shubert Theater stage.The classic story of Atticus Finch, a small-town lawyer who defends a black man in a racist town, was told under the championship flags of the New York Knicks (who have played their own tragedy there for years) and the Rangers. And with a new venue and a younger audience came new standards of theater decorum: The middle and high school students groaned when things went badly for the protagonists and cheered shamelessly at insults lobbed at the town’s most virulent racists.“There’s such an intense energy,” said Jenna Weinberg, a theater teacher at M.S. 839 in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn. “It’s a room full of young people who don’t stop themselves from reacting out loud. They’re not worried about what they’re supposed to act like in a theater.”The intention was to reimagine the play — based on the Harper Lee classic and adapted by the Hollywood screenwriter Aaron Sorkin — for a contemporary audience. Scott Rudin, the main producer, said he wanted to find a way to ensure this drama about racial injustice reached a racially diverse audience.Last year, the production offered $10 tickets to schools, but Mr. Rudin said he imagined an even bigger gesture: one of New York’s largest spaces filled with students from across the city. So Barry Diller, a co-producer, called his friend James L. Dolan, the chief executive of the Madison Square Garden Company, who agreed to the plan for free. The staging had to be radically reimagined for the cavernous space. At the Shubert Theater, the various sets — the courtroom, the Finches’ porch — are moved in and out of view. At the Garden, the settings were laid out across a long, narrow deck, and the actors walked from scene to scene.The logistical concerns were endless. Mr. Rudin ticked through some: “Where does the cast go? How do the kids get in? How do you ticket it?”He added, “What happens if, of the 18,000 kids, 5,000 of them wanted to go to the bathroom?”(Some solutions: Part of the cast prepared in the visiting team’s locker room, and high school choirs were invited to sing during intermission to help keep students in the arena.)The play brought its regular cast, including the actor Ed Harris, who took over the role of Atticus Finch from Jeff Daniels in November. He wasn’t the only celebrity present. Spike Lee was M.C., opening with the story of his own education in New York public schools, and Mayor Bill de Blasio and his wife, Chirlane McCray, also spoke.As for the students, only about 3 percent of the public middle and high schoolers could fit, so the Department of Education granted admission to the first schools to respond to the invitations. The city intervened to make sure that all boroughs were well-represented, as well as schools that specialize in teaching students with disabilities, said Peter Avery, the director of theater for the department.Some students had been assigned to read the original novel, but the drama diverges in some ways from Lee’s work. The play is framed around the trial, while readers do not get there until about halfway through the book. And the story’s most prominent black characters — Calpurnia and Tom Robinson — are allowed more opportunity in the play to voice their frustrations about racial injustice.The racist lines in “Mockingbird” can sound much more jarring when spat out onstage as opposed to being words on a page. And the students didn’t hold back their shock.During a particularly odious rant from the play’s main villain, Bob Ewell, murmurs of disapproval swelled to gasps as he used a racist slur over and over. Then, when Scout’s brother, Jem, calls Ewell an “ignorant son of a bitch,” the reactions transformed into uproarious cheers.It was a performance where emotional reactions were let loose and actors had little privacy, as they were unable to fully exit a space surrounded on all sides by gazing students.On any given night, Taylor Trensch, who plays Dill, a friend of Scout and Jem’s, has to block out the reality around him and imagine he is in the small town of Maycomb, Ala.But this time, the audience was a dozen times bigger than usual, and the theater was not quite so intimate.“There’s one moment when I looked up and it said ‘Bud Light District’ over some of the seats,” Mr. Trensch said. “Kind of made it hard to keep yourself in 1930s Alabama.” More

Josephine Baker may be living in the lap of luxury in Paris, but a nightclub singer in 1930s Harlem, where “nobody’s working and nobody’s got prospects,” is just trying to survive. At least, that’s according to Angel Allen, the Cotton Club singer in Pearl Cleage’s murky “Blues for an Alabama Sky.”The play opens with a drunken Angel (Alfie Fuller) staggering down the street in a fuchsia gown, half-carried by two men. She got dumped and fired by her gangster boyfriend-slash-boss, and gigs are hard to come by, she says, because “everybody in Harlem is singing the blues.” Her friend Guy (John-Andrew Morrison), a self-described “notorious homosexual” who fled Georgia with her, also got the boot as a costume designer at the club.But Guy promises to take care of them. He’s just waiting for an invitation from Ms. Baker to join her in Paris and design her stage attire. Meanwhile, Guy and Angel’s neighbor, Delia (Jasminn Johnson), works to get a family planning clinic open and cautiously flirts with a neighborhood doctor, Sam (Sheldon Woodley). And a gentleman caller (Khiry Walker) from Alabama aims to save Angel from a life of scrapping.“Alabama Sky,” produced by Keen Company and directed by LA Williams, begins at a leisurely pace, full of entrances and exits, people stopping by for a drink and chat. (You-Shin Chen’s set design, featuring two parallel doorways center stage to create a hallway, spotlights the motion.) Harlem is referred to constantly, insistently, through clunky name-drops of local greats: Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and Langston Hughes, with whom the characters are conveniently on a first-name basis.But Harlem has lost its shimmy and shake, Guy swears; Amsterdam Avenue can’t hold a candle to the Champs Élysées. This, it initially seems, is where the play is headed — a glimpse of life in Depression-era Harlem through the eyes of its residents, a meditation on hopes and dreams. Instead, a pregnancy and conversations about the ethics of contraception and abortion reconfigure the play as a story about the choices women make.“Alabama Sky” wants to be about the relationship between Guy and Angel, but his character lacks dimension, and it’s her choices that are at the nexus of the action. And yet the play fails to commit its focus to its protagonist. At first styled as resourceful during a time of poverty, Angel is later drawn to be selfish and cutthroat at the expense of those around her. (Sam, Delia and Leland seem to exist as filler material to cushion Angel’s arc.) But the roots of her ruthlessness and Guy’s persistent loyalty to her aren’t accounted for by the play’s bread crumbs of a back story about their past lives in Georgia.Cleage’s script and Fuller’s performance serve Angel best when they lean into her diamond toughness, but we don’t see enough of it until the final act, when the stakes rocket upward. And despite her spunky appeal, Fuller can’t pull off a believable performance as a nightclub songbird in a thin rendition of “St. Louis Blues.”“I’m tired of Negro dreams,” Angel says, but the statement outweighs the play’s material, which approaches then crab-walks away from its would-be Pole Star. She must be talking about more than “the myth of the magical Josephine,” but we have no way to know. Paris is a long way away, but, here, so is Harlem, its residents and anything sounding like the blues.Blues For an Alabama SkyThrough March 14 at Theater Row, Manhattan; 212-239-6200, keencompany.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More