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      Review: In ‘Scene Partners,’ Dianne Wiest Delivers Another Master Class

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      The transcendent Dianne Wiest stars in an absurd yet poignant new play about a 75-year-old woman who sets out to be a star.“Acting Like a Maniac” is not your typical acting class: You have to sign a personal injury waiver to join it. But then Meryl Kowalski, with that double whammy of a theatrical name, isn’t your typical student. Though 75, she’s no cute oldster; Hugo Lockerby, the guru-like teacher with a wandering accent, thinks she may even be a genius. Performing the autobiographical “blueprint” she’s been writing as an exercise, her fellow students are amazed and baffled by the tale (did she really get an agent at gunpoint?) but also the style. “Do you want it realism or should it be more like whoa,” one asks.“Scene Partners,” by John J. Caswell Jr., with the transcendent Dianne Wiest as Meryl, is definitely more like whoa.Twee, snarky, meta, manic, maddening and yet eventually poignant, the play is a moving target, its tone as hard to pin down as its facts. Take the setting, a maybe Hollywood in an iffy 1985. (Also, the Soviet Union and most of the 20th century.) In any case, it’s often impossible to tell whether what we’re watching is Meryl’s life, a film about her life, a dream about the film, a hallucination of the dream, or some other nesting doll of narration.If the authorial bait-and-switch too often feels like throat-clearing, it does serve a purpose, building around the story a border that is also a blur. In Caswell’s world, as in Meryl’s, limits are always permeable.“Scene Partners,” which opened on Wednesday at the Vineyard Theater in a top-drawer production directed by Rachel Chavkin, is part of a genre you might call the absurd picaresque. Meryl is a hardheaded Candide, a sharp-eyed Don Quixote. When we meet her just after the long longed-for death of her abusive husband, she is leaving Wisconsin for California so fast she doesn’t bother burying him. “Within the year I will rise to fame and fortune as an international film star,” she says in farewell to her drug addict daughter. Sure enough, she soon acquires not just her agent and acting coach, but also a contract to write the movie of her life.What makes her life a fit subject for a movie, or even this play, is a useful question. Surely it’s not the banal details: the stepfather, the trauma and the mother who looked away are all tossed off too lightly to stick. Caswell doesn’t at first seem very interested in them except as opportunities to create fascinating verbal spirals, cross-references and death drops, like a game of biographical Chutes and Ladders.Wiest and Josh Hamilton, as an acting teacher, are in top form in John J. Caswell Jr.’s play at the Vineyard Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYet the process of making the banal fascinating is, it seems, Caswell’s point. When Meryl becomes successful, it is not because her life has been special; hers is the stardom of the ordinary, built on perseverance not glamour, and on the recognition that the only thing keeping her from her life goals is her life. “We lose countless masters like this woman,” says Hugo (Josh Hamilton, hilarious yet also noble), “simply because they lacked a certain access at a certain time in history.” The play’s structural gymnastics, which also make room for the possibility of dementia, give Meryl that access, and elevate her.As does Wiest. It’s a little rich to have her play a character in an acting class, considering how many acting classes she’s given over the years, onstage and on film. Still, it’s a great pleasure to watch her make Meryl’s innocence and bloodthirstiness equally believable, equally fresh. The same age as her character, with more than 50 years of theater behind her, Wiest nevertheless seems to be discovering herself each moment, in material that can’t make that easy.The difficulty, though occasionally an indulgence — even at just 105 minutes, “Scene Partners” could stand a 10-minute trim — is also the play’s great distinction. And Chavkin, while maintaining the level of stylishness that has become her trademark in musicals like “Hadestown” and “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812,” is careful not to flatten its extremes. Her rigorous production commits to both cold stretches and warm ones, ripe satire (a nimble supporting cast covers dozens of characters) and barely spoken tragedy. Sometimes — as in scenes with Johanna Day (excellent) as Meryl’s sister — the crosscurrents shift so quickly you don’t know which kind you’re in.Perhaps what we feel tugging at us in those moments is the undertow of addiction and abuse in the story — subjects Caswell has also touched on in his two previous major New York outings, “Wet Brain” and “Man Cave.” Both embraced the surreal as a way of repairing and elevating what appear to be unimportant, unsalvageable lives. Yet by ricocheting off others, in an absurd plane if necessary, they may achieve a kind of magnificence.Indeed, when an interviewer, suspicious of Meryl’s story, asks if she’s ever heard of delusions of grandeur, she answers: “Oh yes, and they can be so helpful!” Without them, we might not have grandeur (or plays, or great actors) at all.Scene PartnersThrough Dec. 17 at the Vineyard Theater, Manhattan; vineyardtheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

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      Why a Boston Tea Party Patriot Is Being Honored in Brooklyn

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      Ebenezer Stevens was among those who boarded three British ships in a symbolic act that helped jump-start the American Revolution.Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll find out why a grave in Brooklyn is getting a plaque about the Boston Tea Party. We’ll also find out about a new theater at the site of what is widely considered the first Black theater company in the United States.The Boston Tea Party took place in Boston.So why will officials from groups based in Boston that are preparing to celebrate the uprising’s 250th anniversary spend Wednesday morning at a cemetery in Brooklyn, 230 miles from where the tea was thrown overboard?To commemorate Ebenezer Stevens, a patriot who boarded one of the ships in Boston Harbor.“He’s a classic example of an ordinary person who does an extraordinary thing,” said Jonathan Lane, the executive director of Revolution 250, a consortium of Massachusetts organizations that is preparing for the anniversary on Dec. 16.“He doesn’t do it alone — he’s in concert with many of his friends and neighbors,” Lane said, “but he was part of a moment in time where people stood up for what they believed were their individual rights and liberties.”Lane will attend this morning’s ceremony at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, during which a plaque for Stevens’s grave will be presented to Jeff Richman, Green-Wood’s historian. The medallion will be the 136th placed on the grave of a Tea Party participant; Stevens is the only one buried in New York City.“He was a rather spirited individual, rather brave, of course,” said Evan O’Brien, the creative manager of Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum, who devised the campaign to mark the graves of the Tea Party patriots. And, O’Brien added, Stevens “risked everything for this cause he believed in — you get a glimpse of his personality that he was involved in this rather outrageous event.”Stevens was one of about 150 people assigned to board three ships in the harbor to protest a British tax on tea and, more broadly, to protest taxation without representation.“What a lot of people think about is it was this unruly mob,” O’Brien said. “That is not true at all. It was a well orchestrated, finely tuned operation. Each man knew his job. Some would haul the chests of tea out of the holds. Others were waiting at the rails to break them open and shake the tea out.”Stevens went on to fight in the Revolution. He took part in the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775 and was there when the British general John Burgoyne surrendered at Saratoga in 1777. He rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel and eventually served under the Marquis de Lafayette.Later, as a major general in the New York State Militia, he mobilized soldiers to defend New York City in case of a British attack during the War of 1812. A fort named for him guarded Hell Gate and the East River channels.Richman, the Green-Wood historian, said that Stevens’s life outside the military was also eventful: He amassed a fortune as an owner of ships — a notice in The Evening Post in 1807 advertised passage and freight shipping to Bordeaux, France, aboard one of Stevens’s “new and fast” sailing ships. He sold liquor to Thomas Jefferson. And a granddaughter became famous: the author Edith Wharton.WeatherLook for a sunny to partly sunny day with temperatures in the mid-50s. Tonight, under a partly cloudy sky, the low will be in the 40s.ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKINGIn effect until Nov. 23 (Thanksgiving Day).The latest New York newsJeenah Moon for The New York TimesMore local newsTurkey ties: A major federal corruption investigation into Mayor Eric Adams’s fund-raising is examining whether his campaign conspired with members of the Turkish government to receive illegal donations. Here’s what we know.Guilty plea: Samuel Miele is the second person who worked on Representative George Santos’s House election campaigns who has pleaded guilty to federal charges.E-bike blaze: After scooter batteries burst into flames on Sunday and killed three people at a home in Brooklyn, the fire commissioner blamed big corporations for contributing to a rising death toll from electric-vehicle batteries.Deadly dispute: A landlord was arrested and charged with murdering his tenants on Tuesday after three people were found stabbed to death in the bedrooms of a Queens home.A new theater that honors what was there beforeCarl Cofield, an associate arts professor at New York University, on the stage of the African Grove Theater.Jonathan KingFor the opening tonight of New York University’s new African Grove Theater, the site’s the thing. The original African Theater, widely considered to have been the first Black theater company in the United States, presented classics like “Richard III” and “Othello” at the same corner, Bleecker and Mercer Streets.“If the model of the African Theater had been followed, American theater would be different,” said Michael Dinwiddie, professor of dramatic writing at N.Y.U.’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, who spearheaded a campaign to name the new performance space in the African Theater’s honor. “It helps us understand the complexity of the American theater.”Appropriately, the play being staged tonight is based on the story of the play that opened the earlier theater on the site, “The African Company Presents Richard III.”The original theater was organized by William Alexander Brown, a retired ship steward from the West Indies. The location at Bleecker and Mercer was his second. He had started out in what is now known as TriBeCa, staging poetry readings and short plays for Black New Yorkers. He moved to the location now occupied by N.Y.U.’s Paulson Center in 1821. Appearing as the king in “Richard III” on opening night was an enslaved man; New York would not outlaw slavery until six years later.Brown presented “Othello” in the second month, but he lasted only two years at the new location. “When he dared to go toe-to-toe with a nearby white theater, each presenting rival Shakespeare productions,” our critic Maya Phillips wrote in 2021, “he was harassed by police and his theater was raided. His performers were attacked. He changed the theater’s name and moved it several times, opening and closing and reopening until the financial well ran dry.”Carl Cofield, an associate arts professor at N.Y.U.’s Tisch School of the Arts and the associate artistic director of the Classical Theater of Harlem, said that Brown was competing against a theater that was “bringing in the biggest stars from Europe,” including Junius Brutus Booth, a British actor whose actor sons included one who was famous, Edwin Booth, and one who was infamous — John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated Lincoln.Dinwiddie told me that he had noticed a plaque commemorating the African Theater at the corner when he moved to the neighborhood in the 1990s. “I was like, I remember that — I had read about it,” he said, including a chapter in “Black Manhattan” by James Weldon Johnson, N.Y.U.’s first Black professor.Hopper’s paintings as operaThe opera “Later the Same Evening” takes five Edward Hopper paintings and imagines what happens to the figures in them. John Musto, who composed the music for Mark Campbell’s libretto, described “Later the Same Evening” as “a love letter to New York, set in 1932.”It’s a love letter as complicated as New York (and New Yorkers), with Hopper-esque moodiness and estrangement.There is a couple that is not getting along. There is a widow who has come to the city for a date she is not sure she wants to go on. There is dancer who is leaving town, her dreams of stardom dashed. The director, Alison Moritz, writes that all of the characters eventually “converge for a moment of true New York serendipity at — where else? — a Broadway show.”Backstage, there is a moment in one scene when four singers converge around a microphone. “Hopper could have done some painting around this one mic,” said Michelle Rofrano, the assistant conductor, who cues them for an old-fashioned radio commercial that is heard onstage. The four sing a made-up toothpaste jingle — “It’s not just white, it’s Pearladent white.”Without a Hopper to capture it, the little tableau dissolves. The singers have other roles in the opera, which will be performed tonight and Friday at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater at the Juilliard School.“The odd thing is people keep talking about Hopper and his sense of color,” Musto said. “I have to keep telling them color means nothing to me. I am colorblind.”METROPOLITAN diary‘You are everything’Dear Diary:I was waiting for a friend outside a building on East 73rd Street when an S.U.V. pulled up and parked.The driver stayed in the car with the radio on and the windows open. “You Are Everything” by the Stylistics came on, and I began to sing along (quietly).As the song got to the chorus — “You are everything, and everything is you” — a guy walked past me. He was singing along too, and we exchanged man-this-is-such-a-great-song nods.Just then, the driver turned off the radio. The other guy and I shared a confused look. Then he approached the car.“Bro,” he implored the driver. “Turn that back on!”And he did.— Joe KatzIllustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.Kellina Moore and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. More

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      ‘Waiting for Godot’ Review: Old Friends Falling in and Out of Sync

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      Michael Shannon and Paul Sparks star in Arin Arbus’s pandemic-delayed production at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center.Samuel Beckett left as little as possible to chance when he wrote “Waiting for Godot,” a play that, 70 years after its first production, usually looks substantially the same: the country road, the withered tree, the battered boots arranged at the top of Act II with “heels together, toes splayed.” In his stage directions, Beckett spent 195 words choreographing some horseplay involving hats.Live performance itself, then, would be the wild card. And so it proved on Saturday night at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, where Michael Shannon is starring as Estragon (a.k.a. Gogo) opposite Paul Sparks as Vladimir (a.k.a. Didi). The two actors are old friends playing old friends, yet through the whole first act there wasn’t the faintest glint of chemistry between them.It was deadening to the production, and baffling for anyone who has admired Shannon’s and Sparks’s work separately or together, onstage or onscreen; I, for one, treasure the memory of them in Craig Wright’s “Lady” Off Broadway 15 years ago. Here their performances sprang into three dimensions only with the arrival, shortly before intermission, of a Boy (a lovely Toussaint Francois Battiste), who brings a message from Godot.I have no idea whether I caught the show on an off night, or if after merely a week of previews the production was still somewhat underbaked. But the inertness of Act I gave way to a high-energy Act II — rather denting the idea that one day in the nearly featureless void of Didi and Gogo’s existence is practically indistinguishable from another, but thank goodness anyway.From then on, Shannon and Sparks were in sync as scruffy, aimless, quarreling clowns who fail anew, by each fresh sunset, the test of being human. Buffeted by love and loathing, Didi and Gogo prefer to do their languishing together.“We always find something, eh Didi,” Gogo says, “to give us the impression we exist?”Arin Arbus’s pandemic-delayed production for Theater for a New Audience lacks a discernible interpretation that we can grab onto, or that can grab onto us. But it does make striking use of the space, with a paved, two-lane road (by Riccardo Hernández) running downhill from the middle of the upstage wall to the back of the auditorium. The double yellow line in the center of the road — denoting a no-passing zone — could also be decoded as a no-dying zone. From the first moments of the play to the last, Didi and Gogo speak of ending their lives, but their passing is not to be.Under merciless sunlight (by Christopher Akerlind), Shannon is a crabbed and shambling Gogo, fidgety and peckish, bedeviled by ill-fitting boots. (Costumes are by Susan Hilferty.) Though Shannon does a bit of comic tumbling on the road, he also sometimes barely has to move to land a laugh, his remarkable gestural efficiency combining with a marvelous dryness of tone.Sparks, meanwhile, brings buoyancy to Didi’s roughness, and a palpable, if bizarro, human center. Inspecting the amnesiac Gogo’s legs for proof of an attack the day before, Didi is ebullient when he finds it: “There’s the wound! Beginning to fester!”A chunk of a scene in Act II, involving Didi, Gogo and their only passers-by — the vicious Pozzo (Ajay Naidu) and the man he has enslaved, Lucky (a vivid Jeff Biehl) — would get bigger laughs if the blocking allowed more than half the house a view of the actors’ faces. A sightline worry throughout the performance is the road itself, whose incline puts some audience members at an awkward angle to the action.This “Godot” comes at a time so fraught that real-world resonances ambush us in the most unexpected shows, so it’s odd that that doesn’t happen here, or didn’t to me. Yet in some ways we are all Didi and Gogo, victims and onlookers — perpetrators, too — in the barbarism of the world.Weary of brutal cycles that keep repeating, they despair of their ability to alter the course.“I can’t go on like this,” Gogo says.And Didi tells him: “That’s what you think.”Waiting for GodotThrough Dec. 3 at Theater for a New Audience, Manhattan; tfana.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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      In Texas, a Fight Over Gender and School Theater Takes an Unexpected Turn

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      After a high school production of “Oklahoma!” was halted in conservative Sherman, Texas, something unusual happened: The school board sided with transgender students.A school district in the conservative town of Sherman, Texas, made national headlines last week when it put a stop to a high school production of the musical “Oklahoma!” after a transgender student was cast in a lead role.The district’s administrators decided, and communicated to parents, that the school would cast only students “born as females in female roles and students born as males in male roles.” Not only did several transgender and nonbinary students lose their parts, but so, too, did cisgender girls cast in male roles. Publicly, the district said the problem was the profane and sexual content of the 1943 musical.At one point, the theater teacher, who objected to the decision, was escorted out of the school by the principal. The set, a sturdy mock-up of a settler’s house that took students two months to build, was demolished.But then something even more unusual happened in Sherman, a rural college town that has been rapidly drawn into the expanding orbit of Dallas to its south. The school district reversed course. In a late-night vote on Monday, the school board voted unanimously to restore the original casting. The decision rebuked efforts to bring the fight over transgender participation in student activities into the world of theater, which has long provided a haven for gay, lesbian and transgender students, and it reflected just how deeply the controversy had unsettled the town.The district’s restriction had been exceptional. Fights have erupted over the kinds of plays students can present, but few if any school districts appear to have attempted to restrict gender roles in theater. And while legislatures across the country, including in Texas, have adopted laws restricting transgender students’ participation in sports, no such legislation has been introduced to restrict theater roles, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.Community members attend a school board meeting at the Sherman Independent School District on Monday night.Desiree Rios for The New York TimesThe board’s vote came after students and outraged parents began organizing. In recent days, the district’s administrators, seeking a compromise, offered to recast the students in a version of the musical meant for middle schoolers or younger that omitted solos and included roles as cattle and birds. Students balked.After the vote, the school board announced a special meeting for Friday to open an investigation and to consider taking action against the district superintendent, Tyson Bennett, who oversaw the district’s handling of “Oklahoma!,” including “possible administrative leave.”Suddenly, improbably, the students had won.“I’m beyond excited and everyone cried tears of joy,” Max Hightower, the transgender senior whose casting in a lead role triggered the ensuing events, said in a text message on Tuesday. He and other theater students were at a costume shop on Tuesday, a class trip that had been meant as a consolation after the disappointment of losing their production. Instead, it turned into a celebration. “I’m getting new Oklahoma costumes!!” he said.Before the school board vote Monday night, high schoolers and their parents had gathered at the district’s offices along with theater actors and transgender students from nearby Austin College. Local residents came to talk about decades of past productions at Sherman High School of “Oklahoma!,” which tells the story of an Oklahoma Territory farm girl and her courtship by two rival suitors. Many scoffed at the district’s objections to the musical, which school officials complained included “mature adult themes.”Sherman High made national headlines last week when it put a stop to a high school production of the musical “Oklahoma!” after a transgender student was cast in a lead role.Desiree Rios for The New York Times“‘Oklahoma!’ is generally regarded as one of the safest shows you could possibly pick to perform,” said Kirk Everist, a theater professor at Austin College who was among those who came to speak. “It’s almost a stereotype at this point.”Every seat in the room was filled, almost entirely with supporters of the production. Some lined the walls while others who were turned away waited outside. Of the 65 people who signed up to speak, only a handful voiced support for the district’s restrictions.The outpouring came as a shock, even to longtime Sherman residents.“What you’re seeing today is history,” said Valerie Fox, 41, a local L.G.B.T.Q. advocate and the parent of a queer high schooler. Ms. Fox said she was taken aback by the scene of dozens of transgender people and their supporters holding signs and flags outside the district offices. “This is one of the biggest things we’ve seen in Sherman.”The town, a short drive from Dallas, has been a place where many conservatives have gone to escape the city. Some were supportive of the superintendent’s initial decision to restrict the musical.“Adult content doesn’t belong in high school; they’re still kids,” Renée Snow, 62, said earlier on Monday as she sat with her friend on a bench outside the county courthouse. “It’s about education. It’s not about lifestyle.”Her friend, Lyn Williams, 69, agreed. “It doesn’t seem like anyone is willing to stand up for anything anymore,” she said.At a local shoe store, no one needed to be reminded of the details of the controversy. One shopper, shaking a pair of insoles, said that she believed that God made people either male or female, and that the issue was a simple as that.“I’m beyond excited and everyone cried tears of joy,” Max Hightower, the transgender senior at the high school whose casting in a lead role triggered the ensuing events, said in a text message on Tuesday. Desiree Rios for The New York TimesInside the courthouse, Bruce Dawsey, the top executive for Grayson County, described a rural community coming to terms with its evolution into a place where urban development is altering the landscape. Not far away, more than a half-dozen cranes could be seen towering over a new high-tech facility for Texas Instruments. The high school, with more than 2,200 students, opened on a sprawling new campus in 2021, its grass still uniform, its newly planted trees still struggling to provide shade. With all the growth, the school is already too small.“The majority is Republican, and it’s conservative Republican,” Mr. Dawsey said. “But not so ultraconservative that it’s not welcoming.”Still, some in and around Sherman have chafed at the changes. When Beto O’Rourke, a Democratic candidate for governor, campaigned through the county last year, he was met with aggressive protesters who confronted him over gun rights, some carrying assault-style rifles. A few wore T-shirts suggesting opposition to liberal urban governance: “Don’t Dallas My Grayson County.”But the controversy over “Oklahoma!” came as a surprise. The musical had been selected and approved last school year, casting was completed in August and more than 60 students in the cast and crew — as well as dozens of dancers — had been preparing for months. Performances were scheduled for early December.Max, 17, had been cast in a minor role. But then, in late October, one of the leads was cut from the production, and Max got the part, the biggest he had ever had. He was elated.Days later, his father, Phillip Hightower, got a call from the high school principal, who told him that Max could not have the part because, under a new policy, no students could play roles that differed from their sex at birth. “He was not rude or disrespectful, but he was very curt and to the point,” Mr. Hightower recalled.Phillip Hightower got a call from the high school principal who told him that Max could not have the part because, under a new policy, no students could play roles that differed from their sex at birth.Desiree Rios for The New York TimesThe district later denied having such a policy. But the principal also left messages for other parents whose children were losing their roles, one of which was shared with The New York Times.“This is Scott Johnston, principal at Sherman High School,” a man’s voice said on the recording. “Moving forward, the Sherman theater department will cast students born as females in female roles and students born as males in male roles.”The message diverged from the rules for high school theater competitions in Texas, which allow for students to be cast in roles regardless of gender.The district did not make Mr. Johnston or the superintendent, Mr. Bennett, available for an interview.In his previous role as an assistant superintendent, Mr. Bennett had objected to the content of a theater production by Sherman High School, according to the former choir director, Anna Clarkson. She recalled Mr. Bennett asking her to change a lesbian character into a straight character in the school’s production of “Legally Blonde” in 2015, and to cut a song entitled “Gay or European?”At the school board meeting on Monday, theater students from the high school described how things had become worse for gay and transgender students at school since the production was halted. Slurs. Taunts. Arguments in the halls.“People are following me around calling me girl-boy,” said Max.Kayla Brooks and her wife, Liz Banks, arrived at the meeting bracing for a tough night. Their daughter Ellis had lost a part playing a male character, and they had been actively working with other parents to oppose the changes.Max Hightower, 17, had originally been cast in a minor part in the musical, but was promoted in October to a leading role, the biggest he had ever had.Desiree Rios for The New York Times“We were both nervous, because we live in Sherman,” said Ms. Banks. Then they saw the large, supportive crowd outside. “We began weeping in the car,” Ms. Brooks said.The school board sat mostly stone-faced as dozens of people testified in support of the theater students, sharing personal histories. A transgender student at Austin College said he had not before come out publicly. Sherman residents lamented the way the school district’s position had made the town look.“I just want this town to be what it can be and not be a laughingstock for the entire nation,” one woman, Rebecca Gebhard, told the board.After nearly three hours, the board went behind closed doors. The crowds left. Few expected a significant decision was imminent.Then, after 10 p.m., the board took their seats again and introduced a motion for a vote: Since there was no official policy on gender for casting, the original version of the musical should be reinstated. All seven board members voted in favor, including one who had, months before, protested against a gay pride event.“We want to apologize to our students, parents, our community regarding the circumstances that they’ve had to go through,” the board president, Brad Morgan, said afterward.Sitting in their living room on Tuesday morning, Ms. Banks and Ms. Brooks recalled how their daughter delivered them the news. “She just said, ‘We won,’” Ms. Brooks said. “She was beaming, smiling ear to ear.” The musical would be performed in January.The couple decided, for the first time, to hang a pride flag in the window of their home. For now, they felt a little more confident in their neighbors than they had a day before.Alain Delaquérière More

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      A Parkland Father Stages the Unthinkable: Losing a Son in a School Shooting

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      Manuel Oliver has a one-man show about the life and death of his son, Joaquin, who was killed in the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.Manuel Oliver had arrived at the point of his one-man show where it was time to re-enact the murder of his son, Joaquin, who was one of 17 people killed in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., in 2018.He donned a paper mask of the face of Joaquin, who was a 17-year-old senior when he was killed. He grabbed a hammer and turned to a life-size portrait of Joaquin and methodically banged it four times — once for each bullet that had struck him — creating a jagged hole. Then Oliver crumpled to the ground, as if lifeless.The searing re-enactment of the shooting was part of “Guac: The One Man Show,” a show about Joaquin that Oliver has been performing around the nation, and that he brought this month to the Theater Row Studio Theater in Manhattan. About 50 people watched as Oliver opened the play with a question: “When you lose a son, what do you do?”In the show “Guac,” Oliver paints on a life-size portrait of Joaquin.Ron DonofrioFor Oliver, part of the answer came in the form of 90 minutes in which he tried to sketch the life of Joaquin: a Venezuelan American boy who was known to his friends as Guac and who loved bacon, buttery popcorn, Guns N’ Roses and the Miami Heat. It was a haunting portrait of a life, and of the abruptness with which it was cut short on Valentine’s Day of 2018 — the moment, as Oliver put it, “that cuts your life in two.”“It makes me feel very connected to my son,” Oliver, 55, said in an interview last week before his latest performance. “I’m a father. I’m Joaquin’s dad. Fathers, that’s what we do. We sit around the table, and we talk about our kids. I want to feel that I also have that right. How am I using that right? Through theater.”“Guac,” which was co-written by Oliver and James Clements and directed by Michael Cotey, is co-produced by ENOUGH! Plays to End Gun Violence and ChangeTheRef, an anti-gun violence advocacy group founded by Oliver and his wife, Patricia.Since Joaquin was killed Oliver, a painter, has used art and activism to push for stronger gun regulation. He created a mural about the demand for change that went viral online, unfurled a picture of his son atop a 150-foot-high crane near the White House, traveled to the sites of other school shootings around the country in a retrofitted school bus and filed a claim against the U.S. government in the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.A few years ago Oliver, who had never acted before, came up with the idea of creating a play after realizing that theater could be an effective way to raise awareness about gun violence.“When you’re working in these areas of activism and looking for justice, you do have the chance to go to rallies and talk to people and they give you five to 10 minutes,” he said. “They may or may not be paying attention. There’s always another speaker after you. So I thought what if I have a full 100 percent attention for an hour about Joaquin’s life? How do I make that happen?”Oliver, center, with his wife, Patricia, and David Hogg, a Parkland survivor, at the March for Our Lives protest against gun violence in Washington in 2022. Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe first performance was in July 2019 at the Los Angeles headquarters of Toms Shoes, a company that was sympathetic to Oliver’s cause, and he later performed it in New York, Orlando, New Orleans, Dallas and other cities until the pandemic brought the tour to a halt. His first post-pandemic performance was in Chicago this summer, and he returned to New York on Nov. 3 and Nov. 11 as part of the United Solo Theater Festival. He hopes to perform it again in New York in 2024, and to bring the show to Europe.The play began with special memories Oliver shared about Joaquin, which he called “magic moments”: He spoke about going to a rock concert together, or about the time a 7-year-old Joaquin accidentally wore his sister’s pants to school.The audience included several people who have survived a mass shooting or who are activists for stricter gun laws. Diego Pfeiffer, who attended the Saturday performance, is a 23-year-old actor who survived the Parkland shooting. He called the show a form of “loving suffering” for Oliver.After the moment when he took a hammer to his son’s portrait, Oliver painted on it. On Saturday, with “Free Bird” by Lynyrd Skynyrd playing, Oliver painted dark blue wings over Joaquin’s shoulders and drew a message in black on his son’s white shirt: “I wish I was here.”“Hope evolves,” Oliver said in the show, tears in his eyes, recalling the frantic moments he and his wife searched for their son, calling repeatedly with no answer. “I was hoping that you left the phone behind. I was hoping that you dropped the phone. I was hoping you were injured but not that bad. And I ended up hoping that it was not painful but fast.” More

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      Shirley Jo Finney, 74, Dies; Addressed the Black Experience Onstage

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      After an acting career that included playing the Olympic sprinter Wilma Rudolph in a TV movie, she became known as a director for her work at regional theaters.The actor and director Shirley Jo Finney in 1974 in Sacramento, Calif., where she studied drama. “I have, basically, always been ‘the first African American,’” she once said.Frank Stork/Sacramento Bee, via the Center for Sacramento HistoryShirley Jo Finney, an actor who became a prolific and award-winning director of plays that dug deeply into the Black experience, died on Oct. 10 in Bellingham, Wash. She was 74.The cause of her death, in a hospital, was multiple myeloma, said Diana Finney, her sister and only immediate survivor.Ms. Finney worked for nearly 40 years at regional theaters, where she directed dramas like Pearl Cleage’s “Flyin’ West, which tells the story of late-19th-century Black female homesteaders in Kansas; Ifa Bayeza’s “The Ballad of Emmett Till,” about the 14-year-old boy who was kidnapped, tortured and shot by two white men in Mississippi in 1955; and Dael Orlandersmith’s “Yellowman,” which examines interracial prejudice through the story of two young lovers, one with a light complexion and one with a dark one.“She was very much drawn to material by great playwrights of color,” Sheldon Epps, the artistic director emeritus of the Pasadena Playhouse, where Ms. Finney directed twice, said by phone. “But it was also a result of the categorization that artists of color still suffer, where they are assigned to Black plays and not thought of for plays by other writers.”Ms. Feeney was, Mr. Epps said, “passionate and relentless in all the right ways.”When asked about her choice largely to direct plays about Black characters and themes, Ms. Finney recalled her background.“I have, basically, always been ‘the first African American,’” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1999, during the run of “Flyin’ West” at the Pasadena Playhouse. “My family was the first African American family to move into the neighborhood that I integrated, and then I had to go to the elementary school there — so I’ve always done that. At U.C.L.A., I was the first African American to be in their M.F.A. program.”She added: “How do you break out of the box, and where do you fit into society? How do we maintain the tradition of a tribe and still transcend our own humanity?”Among the many venues at which Ms. Finney worked were the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, the Cleveland Play House, the Actors Theater of Louisville and the Goodman Theater in Chicago. But if she had a professional home, it was the Fountain Theater in Los Angeles, where she had directed eight plays since 1997, including “The Ballad of Emmett Till.”In 2015, Ms. Finney was asked by Stephen Sachs, the Fountain’s artistic director, to direct his adaptation of “Citizen: An American Lyric” (2014), Claudia Rankine’s book-length poem and series of essays about race in today’s society.“I read it, and I went, ‘Oh, this is my life,’” she said in a 2017 interview featured on the website of the Center Theater Group, home to the Taper, Kirk Douglas and Ahmanson Theaters in Los Angeles. “Citizen,” she said reminded her of “walking through and navigating those torrential waters of mainstream America when you are a person of color or ‘other,’ and what you have to swallow in order to survive.”When the Fountain observed its 25th anniversary in 2015, Charles McNulty, The Los Angeles Times’s theater critic, wrote that Ms. Finney had infused “Citizen” with “the spirit of public reckoning” and added, “Her cast didn’t so much portray characters as stand in solidarity with the nameless voices reflecting, mourning and expressing outrage over the micro and micro aggressions (from a careless bigoted remark to police abuse) confronting Black people on a daily basis.”Shirley Jo Finney was born on July 14, 1949, in Merced, Calif., about 55 miles northwest of Fresno. Her mother, Ricetta (Amey) Finney, was a teacher and counselor. Her father, Nathaniel, sold auto parts. In 1959 she moved to Sacramento with her mother, her sister, her stepfather, Charles James, a municipal court judge, and her stepbrother, also Charles James.In high school, she was in the drama club. She then attended Sacramento City College for one semester before transferring to Sacramento State College (now California State University, Sacramento). At a party, she met Wilma Rudolph, the sprinter who had won three gold medals at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome and was teaching at the school. They became friends, and Ms. Finney became a babysitter for Ms. Rudolph’s children.“I told her, ‘One day, I’m going to make a film about you,’” Ms. Finney recalled in an interview with The Sacramento Bee in 2000.She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in drama in 1971 and earned a master’s degree in theater arts from the University of California, Los Angeles, two years later.After appearing in several television series and films, she was cast by the director Bud Greenspan in the TV movie “Wilma” (1977), which also starred Cicely Tyson as Ms. Rudolph’s mother. It received mixed reviews, but John J. O’Connor of The New York Times wrote that it was “given a touch of substance through a good performance by Shirley Jo Finney.”Ms. Finney as the sprinter Wilma Rudolph, who won three gold medals at the 1960 Summer Olympics, alongside Jason Bernard playing Ed Temple, her coach, in the 1977 television movie “Wilma.”Archive PL/AlamyShe continued to act occasionally into the 1990s, on series like “Lou Grant,” “Hill Street Blues” and “Night Court,” but by that time she had also begun to direct plays.“I love actors, and I love that process of bringing people who are strangers together, to work for a common purpose,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1999. “I love creating an atmosphere where you feel comfortable enough to share who you are, to create. And then you can go within to give the best you can give.”She called that process “orgasmic.”Mr. Sachs of the Fountain Theater said that Ms. Finney developed her own shorthand to communicate with actors.“Actors had to learn to speak ‘Shirley Jo,’” Mr. Sachs said by phone. “She spoke a language unto herself, with body movement and her cackling laugh. She had a way. When she spoke, she’d stand up, pace around the room, or rock on a chair and say, ‘I’m feeling it, I’m feeling it.’ She was almost like a shaman.”Among the honors Ms. Finney received were three Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards for her direction of individual plays and the organization’s Milton Katselas Award for her career work.Although she worked around the country, Ms. Finney never directed on Broadway. Her only chance at it ended in 2008, when financial backing fell apart for a revival of Ntozake Shange’s play “For Colored Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf.”Ms. Finney received a Distinguished Alumni Award in 2012 from the University of California, Los Angeles. Eric Charbonneau/WireImage, via Getty ImagesIn 2010, shortly before rehearsals were to begin for “The Ballad of Emmett Till,” the play’s director, Bennett Bradley, was stabbed to death. Mr. Sachs asked Ms. Finney to take over.“She came into the rehearsal room that day, unprepared, and took over like she had been destined to do it,” Mr. Sachs recalled. “She delivered a benediction to the company; she brought the cast together to tell this story and said that what happened to Ben echoed what happened to Emmett Till. In five or 10 minutes, she turned us around.” More

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      MasterVoices Puts on a Starry Show With a Shoestring Budget

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      This essential organization gives fresh, entertaining life to music theater curiosities. What if it had more money?There’s a lot of Stephen Sondheim in New York at the moment: the premiere staging of his last musical, “Here We Are,” and star-studded revivals of “Merrily We Roll Along” and “Sweeney Todd” on Broadway.And for one weekend this month, there was also one more show of his on: “The Frogs.”This endearingly weird, Aristophanes-inspired musical — created with Burt Shevelove and famously premiered at a Yale University swimming pool in 1974 — hasn’t been onstage in New York since a heavily revised 2004 revival that Sondheim conceived with Nathan Lane, who also performed the role of Dionysos.Few local institutions have the skill or interest to pull off “The Frogs” — with its bookish references and ironic-then-impassioned music — but it’s typical, delightful fare for MasterVoices and its artistic director, Ted Sperling, who mounted and conducted a concert staging of the musical at the Rose Theater. (Lane was there, too, now as a host guiding the audience through the show.)MasterVoices, a nonprofit chorus that mounts theatrical productions of seldom heard repertoire, lends its performances generously sized orchestras, a rarity on Broadway, as well as its chorus, which for “The Frogs” consisted of an all-volunteer group of 130 singers. Sondheim’s ensemble material was in moments gleefully tongue-in-cheek, as when extolling Dionysos with a lightly psychedelic, 1960s-style tune; at others, it sounded genuinely serious about the role of art in wartime.Nathan Lane, who conceived a revised version of “The Frogs” with Sondheim in the early 2000s, returned to the show with MasterVoices.Erin BaianoSperling had a command of this material befitting his experience: His first professional gig in New York, after college, was as a rehearsal pianist for Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park with George.” (He also played synthesizer on the original cast recording: “All that harpsichord-sounding stuff is me,” he said with a self-effacing laugh during a recent interview.)In that conversation, shortly after the three-performance run of “The Frogs,” Sperling discussed how MasterVoices — previously known as the Collegiate Chorale — approaches its adaptations of rarely heard material.For starters, this scrappy organization can attract top talent like Lane because “we’re only asking them for two weeks of their time,” Sperling said, “not asking them to commit to a year’s run on Broadway.” As a result, “we are able to present all kinds of pieces that I don’t think other people can right now.”MasterVoices has independence and pluck: It managed to stay active during the pandemic by producing an online adaptation of Adam Guettel’s cult favorite song cycle “Myths and Hymns.” It has collaborated with the New York Philharmonic, as when it offered a thrilling performance of the Italian modernist Luigi Dallapiccola’s “Il Prigioniero” in 2013.At New York City Center in 2019, the group and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s put on an intoxicating performance of Kurt Weill and Ira Gershwin’s rarely heard “Lady in the Dark.”That range is a legacy of the original Collegiate Chorale — a group that, at its 1941 founding, was one of the first racially integrated classical ensembles. “Even the very early programs that I’ve been able to take a look at start with Bach and end with a Broadway tune,” Sperling said. “The DNA of the group has always been to try to be the people’s chorus, and something that represented a large swath of our community and that would have a broad appeal.”In recent seasons, I’ve heard MasterVoices give witty, precise accounts of George Gershwin’s political parody “Let ’Em Eat Cake” and Bizet’s original, comic opera version of “Carmen.” Any organization that can do justice to such a wide range of material has my immediate affection. But I’m far from the only fan: The “Frogs” run was sold out.But should more people have the opportunity to see them sing? The chorus’s budget for this season — in which they’ll also present Ricky Ian Gordon’s opera adaptation of “The Grapes of Wrath” next April — stands at a slight $1.9 million. Sperling, who is in his 10th year with the group, has some ideas of what he would do with more money, beyond simply expanding the number of performances.“I’d love to have a family of young singers who are professionals — and expert — who could be the backbone of our choral sound, and also step out and do smaller solo work,” he said. “And maybe also help us spread the joy of choral singing in our community, by being teaching artists.”The MasterVoices chorus is made up of volunteer singers, 130 of whom performed in “The Frogs.”Erin BaianoSperling wouldn’t mind a permanent home, either. In recent years, MasterVoices has bounced around from New York City Center to Carnegie Hall and Jazz at Lincoln Center, often renting spaces on its own. For “The Frogs,” Sperling noted, the crew loaded into the Rose Theater on Friday morning, just in time for a performance that evening. “I’d love to have a little more rehearsal time for everything we do,” he said. “It always seems like we’re doing it at the very edge of what we’re capable of.”Given those constraints, the group’s capability is all the more impressive. The MasterVoices version of Weill’s “Lady” included an updated book by Chris Hart and Kim Kowalke; that version has since been used in a celebrated production of the musical in the Netherlands. And because New York doesn’t have a comic opera company, MasterVoices fills a crucial, consistently entertaining niche. “I love that we can present these pieces that would not sustain a commercial Broadway run,” Sperling said, “or might not even fit in the opera house, necessarily, right now.”He added that he would like to add more projects to the season, which could raise MasterVoices’ visibility. They wouldn’t have to be at the scale of “The Frogs,” either: “I’d be interested in doing some smaller pieces that are part of that repertoire that I’m so eager to bring back to New York.”That might include William Bolcom’s early musical “Casino Paradise,” whose original production Sperling worked on. But, given the flexibility and inventiveness of MasterVoices, the possibilities are extensive.“I feel like there are a lot of operas out there that have been extremely popular around the country but have not found a home in New York yet,” Sperling said. “I’m on a mission to find out which ones of those would be a good fit for us.” More

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      “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding” Makes Black Women Feel at Home

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      “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding” is a play where the Black women in the audience are the ones who feel most at home.In a scene in Jocelyn Bioh’s “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding,” a man rolls in a cart of items to sell to the clients and stylists at the titular salon. I recognized the character immediately and sat up, anticipating the joke. I wasn’t the only one: A small contingency of the audience at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater started snickering and laughing before he had even fully stepped onstage.Those of us who have spent hours in salon chairs, amid the scent of coconut oil and the acrid aroma of bleach, moving in a circuit between stylist’s chair, sink and sweltering-hot dryer, know this vendor. In Bioh’s play he sells socks, and later another shows up selling jewelry. In the salons I went to as a child, I remember men peddling bootlegged movies and fashions to the clients with their hair wrapped or freshly sheened as they dug for cash in their purses. “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding” draws its comedy from this world — a world familiar to many Black women audience members like me.Bioh’s salon isn’t an abstraction or callback; it’s a Black business set in modern-day Harlem. In other words, this new Broadway production, directed by Whitney White, proves the value of a work by Black artists that recreates the appearance, tone and feel of a contemporary Black space. It feels great, for once, to be in on the joke.Bioh’s writing captures the quirks of a Black hair salon, and the characters who populate it: the unfortunate early-bird client who’s first to arrive when the shop’s late to open, the internal salon politics of stylists competing for clients, the inappropriate gossip, the sense of community. And always the one person — at Jaja’s, it’s a stylist sharply insulted by her colleague for her fish stew — who is only just now getting a chance to eat a late lunch of the most pungent food you can imagine.But then I wondered: How many people in this Broadway audience share my familiarity? And if that number is small, then is it the production’s responsibility to educate those who don’t?The production offered a talkback series called “A Part of Our Culture,” including discussions on the CROWN Act and salon life. At the talkback I attended, a former New York State assemblywoman, Tremaine S. Wright, recounted using her tenure to champion the CROWN (Create a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair) Act, and the celebrity stylist Susan Oludele (Hair by Susy), wearing a regal curtain of golden beaded braids, told the story of a client who spent $700 for a braided style but came back the next day distraught because her employer had demanded she take them out. Jamia Wilson, a writer-speaker and Random House executive editor whose locs curled into light brown tips, shared a story about a professor’s insistence that her hair would get in the way of her career.Though there were occasional gasps of disbelief in the audience, I wasn’t surprised by these stories; I know firsthand how draining it can be to answer ignorant questions about my hair from non-Black people or swallow microaggressions and rude remarks.Kalyne Coleman in “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesI wore my hair braided all through elementary school. I remember a white student in a younger grade regularly greeting me by pointing to my head and calling out “spiders.” In middle school, when I switched to cornrows with extensions, a frenemy repeatedly asked about my fake “horse hair.” I got questions about the different hairstyle lengths and about how “clean” my braids were.In high school, by which time I’d switched to relaxers, I found out that a boy I’d briefly had a crush on years earlier had been roasted for admitting to his buddy that he liked me. “But she looks like Whoopi Goldberg!” the buddy apparently said, though I neither had locs nor looked anything like Whoopi. But I was Black and had braids, and somehow, I understood, that meant I was less appealing.In the talkback, Wilson said Bioh’s play is accessible to everyone. I don’t disagree with her, but I suspect there’s plenty the typical Broadway theatergoer may not know or might overlook.I also don’t think it matters.In recreating a Black Harlem salon with all of its faults and charms, “Jaja’s” is, like our own salons, giving a specific demographic a welcome, familiar space where we call the shots and drive the conversations.When the clients of Jaja’s salon rose up from their chairs, one woman’s blonde Beyoncé braids cascading down her back, another woman’s Afro tidily plaited in playful zigzag cornrows, and a microbraids client’s TWA (teeny-weeny Afro) suddenly a veil of teeny-tiny jet-black braids, my audience cheered. I’ve never had a theater full of people cheer for me after hours of getting my braids done, but I’ve definitely felt like cheering, my stomach growling, my butt numb, my scalp tender and throbbing as I shakily stood up from the chair.“I feel like I moved in for the day,” the microbraids client said just before leaving Jaja’s shop.I know exactly how she feels. More