Ayers, Stori

Subterms

    Latest story

    150 Shares149 Views

    Why Some Black Playwrights Are Saying Their Shows Must Not Go On

    by

    Several Black playwrights have canceled productions of their works, in some cases after performances started, because of concerns about conditions at the theaters presenting them.In Ohio, the playwright Charly Evon Simpson scuttled last month’s planned Cleveland Play House production of her latest work, “I’m Back Now,” after the director said that the theater had mishandled an actor’s report that she was sexually assaulted at the building where the theater housed artists.In Chicago, Erika Dickerson-Despenza forced Victory Gardens Theater to stop its production of “cullud wattah,” her Flint water crisis-prompted family drama, in the middle of its run last summer to protest actions that included the ouster of the theater’s artistic director.And in Los Angeles, Dominique Morisseau shut down a Geffen Playhouse production of her play “Paradise Blue” a week after its opening in late 2021, saying that Black women who worked on the show had been “verbally abused and diminished.”The steps by playwrights to halt productions of their own work reflects concerns by Black artists frustrated by what they see as a failure of theater administrators to live up to the lofty promises made during and after the spring of 2020, when George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police prompted nationwide protests and calls for change in many corners of American society, including the arts. In theater, an anonymously-led coalition of artists, known by the title of its first statement, “We See You, White American Theater,” circulated a widely read set of demands for change.“We don’t want to be pulling our plays — we are playwrights, we want our plays to be done, we are walking away from money, and we are walking away from seeing our work onstage,” Morisseau said. “But this is not an ego act and it is not a diva act. What we are doing is standing up when no one else will.”The cancellations have come just as theaters have been trying to reopen and rebuild following the lengthy pandemic shutdown.There has been notable change to address concerns about diversity and representation: An increase in the number of plays by Black writers staged on Broadway and beyond; a wave of appointments of administrators of color to high-level theater industry positions; the renaming of two Broadway houses after Black performers (James Earl Jones and Lena Horne).More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.But the cancellations reflect recurrent concern about conditions in the industry. There is pain all around — although actors are often still paid, the playwrights can lose fees and the theaters lose box office revenue and sunk production costs. And there are reputational risks: Will theaters still want to hire these artists? Will artists still want to work at these theaters?“It’s damaging to the theaters, it’s damaging to the playwrights, and it’s damaging to all the artists involved, but it puts a spotlight on issues that need a spotlight, and I hope it’s catching the field’s attention and reminding us that we haven’t solved all the problems,” said Sheldon Epps, a senior artistic adviser at Ford’s Theater in Washington, the former artistic director of the Pasadena Playhouse, and the author of a new memoir, “My Own Directions: A Black Man’s Journey in the American Theater.” “We had all those conversations and all those conference calls, and the talk was valuable but clearly a lot more action is needed.”The playwright Jeremy O. Harris threatened to pull “Slave Play” from the Center Theater Group in Los Angeles to protest its dearth of works by women. After they agreed to stage more, the play, starring Antoinette Crowe-Legacy and Paul Alexander Nolan, went on.Craig SchwartzThese cancellations began in October of 2021, when Jeremy O. Harris posted on Twitter an email he had sent to the Center Theater Group of Los Angeles, saying he wanted to “begin the process” of canceling that theater’s production of “Slave Play,” his acclaimed drama about interracial relationships. The Los Angeles production was to be the first since a pair of buzzy Broadway runs, but Harris was upset that the theater had announced a season with just one work by a woman.The reaction was immediate. The company apologized publicly, and within a week had pledged that the following season at its Mark Taper Forum would feature only work by women or nonbinary playwrights. Harris then allowed “Slave Play” to proceed; the production became the best-selling show at the Taper since the pandemic shutdown.“We have nothing to lose by telling a theater that we don’t want to be their mascots any longer,” Harris said.“Here’s the thing: writing a play is an act of community service, and even in pulling the play you are doing an act of community service — that is theater as well, because the conversation that gets sparked is similar to the conversation sparked by doing the play,” he added. “The only cost is to the ego of theater administrators who have dropped the ball in upholding the politics of the playwrights they’ve programmed.”Harris ultimately praised the Center Theater Group for its responsiveness, and Meghan Pressman, the theater’s managing director and chief executive, said she was “grateful” for Harris’s confrontation, even though it was difficult.“We’re being called to task, and we learned a lot,” she said. Morisseau was next, pulling the rights for “Paradise Blue” from the Geffen. The precipitating incident has never been made public, but Morisseau said at the time that “Harm happened internally within the creative team, when fellow artists were allowed to behave disrespectfully.” The Geffen apologized, saying, “an incident between members of the production was brought to our attention and we did not respond decisively in addressing it.”In an interview, Morisseau said she considered pulling her play a last resort.“I felt there was nothing else for me to do,” she said.And why have there been several cancellations in recent months? “I think what you’re seeing is a failure of institutions and institutional leadership to take seriously the harms against Black women,” Morisseau said. “It’s nothing new to us, but it is very disappointing to experience it in a theater ecosystem that we all seek to be better. You can’t welcome us and our stories, and not welcome the people who tell our stories and the bodies on whom our stories are told.”Playwrights, unlike screenwriters, have enormous power over the use of their work, sometimes by virtue of their contracts, and sometimes by virtue of the nature of their relationships with regional theaters.Prepandemic, there were occasional instances of playwrights exercising such rights for a variety of reasons. In 2016, Penelope Skinner withdrew a Chicago theater’s right to stage her dark comedy, “The Village Bike,” after a news report detailed allegations that the theater’s leader had mistreated performers; in 2012, Bruce Norris withdrew a German theater’s right to stage his Pulitzer Prize-winning race-relations satire, “Clybourne Park,” because he was angry about plans to cast a white actor to play a Black character; and in the 1980s, several playwrights canceled productions because of a union dispute.“We encourage authors to exercise all of their contractual rights to the extent possible,” said Ralph Sevush, the executive director of business affairs at the Dramatists Guild of America, an association representing playwrights.For the affected theaters, the cancellations have been disruptive — in each case, tickets had already been sold. Victory Gardens, which was already imploding when “cullud wattah” was pulled, has since stopped producing shows; the Cleveland Play House and Geffen Playhouse both issued apologies.“Cleveland Play House acknowledges there were missteps in efforts to respond to a sexual assault,” that organization said in a statement last month.The financial implications vary from case to case. Morisseau said that, when “Paradise Blue” was canceled, “Every artist got paid through their contracts. I, as the writer, and the Geffen, as the institution, are the only ones who took any financial hit.” David Levy, a spokesman for the labor union Actors’ Equity Association, said that “Every Equity agreement anticipates worst case scenarios in which a production is canceled before the full run of the show is completed. When that happens, the union does our part to enforce the contract so that actors and stage managers are taken care of.” In Cleveland, the union filed grievances that led to payment to its members for the canceled show there.The current round of cancellations is directly tied to the racial reckoning that has roiled theaters over the last three years; there have been a wide array of calls for change, from term limits for industry leaders and more diverse creative teams sought by the We See You petitions, to the renaming of theaters and the use of racial sensitivity coaches won in a pact negotiated by the organization Black Theater United.Black artists have cited the issues that propelled those movements in describing their current concerns. In Chicago, Dickerson-Despenza pulled the rights to her play after the dismissal of the theater’s artistic director, Ken-Matt Martin, who was one of three Black leaders in top positions at Victory Gardens. At the time Dickerson-Despenza decried the “white supremacist capitalist patriarchal values” of the board. On Wednesday, the board issued a statement saying, “Victory Gardens Theater vehemently disagrees with the characterization,” noting that it had had a diverse staff and board, and adding that “it is our hope that, rather than jumping to conclusions and casting aspersions, we can all move forward with a shared goal of having a vibrant and inclusive theater community for all.”Stori Ayers, who directed both the canceled production of “I’m Back Now” in Cleveland and the canceled production of “Paradise Blue” in Los Angeles, used similar language in an Instagram post about the two experiences, citing “white supremacy theater making culture.” Both of those theaters declined to comment beyond their written statements.Simpson, the playwright who pulled the rights for “I’m Back Now” from the Cleveland Play House, said she had decided to take that step after Ayers withdrew from the production over the theater’s response to an actor who said she had been sexually assaulted in an elevator at the theater’s artist housing.“To put it simply: if the health, safety and well-being of people working on my play is in question, then there’s no reason for the play to happen,” Simpson said. “I could no longer trust that the theater was going to take care of the people putting on my show.”Simpson said she’s not sure what will happen next with “I’m Back Now,” because it was commissioned by the Cleveland Play House, and this was to be its first production. The play is about three generations of Cleveland residents, including a historical figure named Sara Lucy Bagby, who was the last person forced to return to slavery under the Fugitive Slave Act.“You want the production, and you want to make it possible, and many of us are taught to be so grateful for that and to ignore things that may bother us,” Simpson said. “I didn’t ever imagine having to pull the rights.” More

    More stories

    • 88 Shares129 Views

      in Theater

      Review: ‘Confederates’ Talks Race in Double Time

      by

      In Dominique Morisseau’s promising new play, the action is in the ideas and the setting bounces between the Civil War era and the present.“This play is not like all of my others,” Dominique Morisseau writes in an author’s note in the script for “Confederates.” The new play, about two Black women living in different times but dealing with similar oppression, carries several signatures of Morisseau’s work and yet uses narrative techniques that are departures for her. It makes sense then that “Confederates,” which opened on Sunday at the Pershing Square Signature Theater, feels like an elegant experiment, thoughtful and put-together but not quite realizing its full potential.“Confederates,” which was commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Penumbra Theater, begins with Sandra (Michelle Wilson), a political science professor who has just found an offensive photoshopped image of an enslaved woman on her office door. A few minutes later she’s gone and we’ve stepped back in time to the Civil War, where we meet Sara (Kristolyn Lloyd), a fierce young enslaved woman who will become a spy for the Union.These women and their contemporaries are the alternating focal points of the play, directed by Stori Ayers. The attention shifts so rapidly from one story to the other that they become two halves of a dialogue.Michelle Wilson as Sandra, a college professor, in “Confederates.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesKristolyn Lloyd as Sara, an enslaved woman and Union spy in the Civil War era.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRachel Hauck’s scenic design — two antique chairs, a bench and a side table with drawers, surrounded by the towering white columns and high balcony of a plantation house — is neutral and, at eye-level, uninspiring. But through the heights of the house’s architecture and the spaces between the columns, the set creates a dimension and depth that makes it seem as if the background extends into the ornate corridors and rooms of a Southern home.Known for her Detroit cycle, including “Skeleton Crew,” which just completed its debut Broadway run last month, Morisseau typically opts for realism and traditional, chronological storytelling. In fact, she excels at it; she examines the intersections of race, class and gender through characters that feel as real as a neighbor you hear kicking off his boots at the end of a workday.This play’s structure, however, is different. There’s a textbook quality to it; every scene baldly illustrates a theme, whether it’s the sexualization of Black women, the ways institutions turn Black women against one another, or how expectations of Black men and Black women differ. What action there is consists of arguments and discussions usually involving two or three people, with everything else taking place in the background. For Sara, that means the usual toils of the plantation and the not-so-distant gunshots of the war, which she imagines spells freedom. For Sandra, it’s her search for the perpetrator of the photo and her troubled relationships with her colleagues and students.Morisseau blurs this binary by having the three other characters in the play double-cast: Abner (Elijah Jones), Sara’s brother who escaped the plantation to fight for the Union, is also Malik, one of Sandra’s students. In the past there’s Missy Sue (Kenzie Ross), the plantation owner’s daughter and Sara’s childhood friend; in the present, she is Candice, Sandra’s talkative student assistant. LuAnne (Andrea Patterson) is a house slave when she isn’t Jade, in the present day a colleague of Sandra’s. Morisseau cleverly mirrors the conversations between story lines, so, for example, Missy Sue naïvely adores her slave friend the way Candice idolizes her Black professor.Jones, left, as Malik, a student of Sandra, right.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAyers’s direction, along with Ari Fulton’s clever tear-away costumes and Nikiya Mathis’s chic array of wigs and hairstylings, is liveliest in the transitions from the past to present, and in the production’s tiny anachronisms, like a slave giving dap. It appears that the play is going into more experimental territory as the characters’ entrances and exits begin to overlap across the timelines, but Ayers seems wary of doing anything more than having them pass like anonymous commuters at Port Authority. Too often her approach seems procedural, but there are moments when the direction shows spunk, as in the flashier transitions, when someone marches or struts to the music, which switches between old racist ballads like “Dixie” and “Oh! Susanna” to rhythmic original songs arranged by Jimmy Keys (a.k.a. J. Keys).Though the show uses the ancillary characters as the points of contact between Sara’s world and Sandra’s, the two women themselves don’t actually meet. “Confederates” creates this tension between its two parts but doesn’t do anything with it. If Morisseau has built her stories with this inherent magic of alternating settings, allowing us to time-travel with her through a discussion of racial politics then and now, why not try to allow the worlds of the two protagonists to extend a bit more? Why not go bigger? Get more bizarre?Because there’s a certain isolation to the story; we’re in the Big House or Sara’s cabin or we’re in a university office. “Confederates” wants to keep our eyes on the two main institutions here (slavery, academia), each of which breeds or fosters its own forms of oppression. Each scene so clearly illustrates a point in the play’s thesis on race that the stakes don’t seem real; we’re just in the realm of discourse.At least Morisseau doesn’t let the pedagogic obscure the poetic. Her language is as gorgeous as always — and just as sharp. So a conversation about sexuality leads LuAnne to say, “Nature ain’t no slave. It move to its own rhythm,” using the terms of enslavement as a way to talk about the untamable lusts of the body. And Morisseau can dress up an atrocity in a metaphor without obscuring the horror beneath the surface, as when Sara describes seeing slaves “whipped so bad looked like their skin came alive and was crawling on they own flesh.”Beautiful language that’s wedded to tales of adversity — the play is full of such paradoxes, another one being that “Confederates” is a work about racism that is truly funny. There’s a lightness to the satire, but it’s not in the writing alone; the roughly 90-minute production has a nimble cast.From left, Kenzie Ross as the master’s daughter, Missy Sue, with Lloyd, as Sara. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJones brings an animated repartee to his characters’ interactions, and Ross successfully plays up the cluelessness of her white characters (“OMIGOD. I was completely racist just then,” she exclaims as Candice, owl-eyed in shame with mouth agape). Patterson oozes cool as the brusque, sharpshooting Jade but has less heft to her characters.Wilson embodies the poised and self-assured academic in a red power suit, but the character doesn’t allow her to show much range, while Sara is the play’s most rewarding role, incorporating both a brassy brand of satire and ferocious politico-historical oration. Lloyd easily hits the comic notes and channels a Harriet Tubman-esque bearing in Sara but isn’t as comfortable holding the deeper emotions of the character.Morisseau is a fabulous playwright, so much so that even in her plays’ flaws her brilliance still shines through. And seeing an artist try something new in her art is exciting. What’s even more exciting than that? Anticipating how much further — in her settings, in her stories — she can go.ConfederatesThrough April 17 at the Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; signaturetheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Theater

      Review: In ‘Crowns, Kinks and Curls,’ Getting to the Roots of Black Hair

      by

      Keli Goff’s series of vignettes feature Black women recounting how their hair affected their school lives, relationships or careers.I have 4b hair that remained virgin hair, mostly styled in box braids and cornrows with extensions, until I was 13, when I got my first relaxer. My scalp has known chemical burns, hot comb burns, curling iron burns, flat iron burns and the unrelenting throbbing that comes with hours of tight root-wrenching braiding. I got my big chop at 21 and have been natural — years of T.W.A.s and twist-outs and wash ‘n’ go’s — ever since.Do you get what I’m saying, or am I speaking another language?I’ve written about my hair before, and every time I do I’m well aware of the vocabulary, which I’m sure is unfamiliar to many non-Black readers. Though it’s not just a matter of terms or phrases: Black women often encounter unprovoked opinions and wrong assumptions from employers, strangers — even family and friends — about what their hairstyle says about their professionalism, their social status or their relationship to Blackness.The personal, cultural and political implications of Black hair are at the root of the well-meaning but less than inspired “The Glorious World of Crowns, Kinks and Curls.” (And yes, pun definitely intended.)Written by Keli Goff and produced by and filmed at Baltimore Center Stage, “Crowns, Kinks and Curls” is a series of vignettes, each one featuring a Black woman recounting how her hair affected her school life, relationships or career. The piece channels the spirit of Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls,” though the writing, albeit earnest, is far less poetic.The actresses Stori Ayers, Awa Sal Secka and Shayna Small embody all of the fictional women, donning different do’s to do so. (Nikiya Mathis handled the eclectic mix of hair and wig designs.) Most of the scenes are monologues, though occasionally two or three women meet, say, in the office of a mostly white law firm, where an older straight-haired lawyer named Sharon (Ayers) berates a younger one, Ally (Sal Secka), for wearing her hair in braids: “I’m sorry, I can’t let you meet a major client looking like this.”Gaby (Small), with sleek face-hugging Josephine Baker-style finger waves, recalls her mother’s distress that she cut her “good hair” for her wedding day, showing how hair reflects the generational trauma held by some Black women. Wanda (Ayers), in bouncy mocha and champagne blonde curls, recounts how an ex-boyfriend reproached her for pressing her natural hair for an interview, illustrating how “authentic Blackness” is often policed even within the Black community.And so every tale has its moral, none of which should be new to any Black woman. They certainly weren’t for me, a woman who has had white people make awkward comments about my hair, ask questions and even ask to touch my crown in admiration.Which is to say “Crowns, Kinks and Curls” excited me more conceptually than it did in its actual execution, which was all perfectly serviceable, from the performances to Bianca LaVerne Jones’s staging, to Dede Ayite’s set, with a big, puzzling backdrop of large flowers.Scenes span recent history, some taking place during the Obama Administration and others referencing former President Trump and 2019’s Crown Act against hair-based discrimination. These glimmers of vibrancy underscore the timeliness of the topic, given how the social consciousness of Blackness has shifted since the Obama era.In one humorous monologue, Sal Secka, wearing an Afro pony — ethereal and exquisitely cloudlike — plays a woman named Adaora who has accompanied her biracial daughter to see the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle and cheer on the Black princess.In a somber scene, two unnamed women (Sal Secka and Ayers) unwrap and unpin their hair in silence, as “Strange Fruit” is sung offstage; they are preparing to go to a funeral for a Black husband and son unjustly killed. It’s the one sequence in which hair is not so explicitly the topic of discussion, but rather is powerfully positioned as part of a larger expression of the Black experience, particularly at this moment in history.In a somber scene, Stori Ayers unwraps and unpins her hair in silence.Diggle/Baltimore Center StageThe show’s program includes a brief timeline of the history of Black women’s hairstyles and hair practices, referencing enslaved women’s use of head wraps and braids before enduring the Middle Passage, along with the work of hair pioneers like Madam C.J. Walker and George E. Johnson Sr. There’s so much to be mined in the history of Black hair that “Crowns, Kinks and Curls” feels like it has missed opportunities to go further — or even incorporate real stories.Why not use the smart, funny and vulnerable voices of real Black women? Why not devise scenes that are more than neatly prepared monologues?And because it is a rarity to see Black women talking about their Black hair onstage, what I saw only made me hungry for more: I wanted to see more Black women of different shades, in not only wigs and weaves but also their own natural ‘fros. I was disappointed, in scenes where women were supposed to be wearing natural hair, to see false approximations.I believe this very capable show — which had a creative team entirely comprising Black women, to my utter delight — can be more. I hope it happens if and when it’s staged in person, as it’s the kind of work I both want and need to see, as a Black female critic and as a Black woman writing about an art form that too often fails people of color.So as I undid my own head of flat twists this weekend in preparation for a much-needed trip to the salon, this earnest request crossed my mind: more Black women, and more (and more and more) of those curls.The Glorious World of Crowns, Kinks and CurlsThrough April 18; centerstage.org More