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      ‘Aftershock’ Review: A Moving Ode to the Black Family

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      Black mothers are dying from childbirth at alarming rates. A new documentary explains why.There’s no getting around just how terribly sad it feels watching “Aftershock,” the new documentary from the directors Paula Eiselt (“93Queen”) and Tonya Lewis Lee. After all, it spotlights the tragic deaths of two Black mothers in New York City who died from childbirth-related complications — Shamony Gibson, in 2019, and Amber Isaac, in 2020 — leaving behind young children, partners, families and communities gutted by grief.But alongside the despair, there is also light in this documentary. Gibson’s partner, Omari Maynard, and her mother, Shawnee Benton Gibson, a medical social worker with a background in reproductive justice activism, had been mourning their loss for a year and a half when Maynard reached out to the newly bereaved partner of Isaac, Bruce McIntyre. The two men soon banded together with Benton Gibson and others to organize for change.Eiselt and Lee successfully put a human face on the now widely reported crisis of Black maternal deaths, which allows them to unpack the underlying factors that have led to the crisis without bogging down the narrative in a deluge of statistics. Yet scenes with the main subjects sometimes feel more staged than vérité, and the audience walks away wishing we knew them better as people.Still, the images of Maynard and McIntyre parenting their children in the midst of grief and outrage, and expressing vulnerability as well as strength, act as a powerful counternarrative to pervasive stereotypes about absentee Black fathers. “Aftershock” is a moving ode to Black families in a society where too many forces work to tear them apart.AftershockNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      Angel Blue Withdraws From Opera, Citing ‘Blackface’ in Netrebko’s ‘Aida’

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      The American soprano Angel Blue said she would not appear at the Arena di Verona after the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko and other performers wore dark makeup in its production of “Aida.”A leading American soprano, Angel Blue, announced this week that she was withdrawing from her planned debut at the Arena di Verona in Italy to protest its use of “blackface makeup” in a production of Verdi’s “Aida” that starred the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko.“The use of blackface under any circumstances, artistic or otherwise, is a deeply misguided practice based on archaic theatrical traditions which have no place in modern society,” Blue, a Black soprano with a growing international career, said in a statement on social media, adding that she would withdraw from her upcoming performances in “La Traviata,” another Verdi opera. “It is offensive, humiliating and outright racist. Full stop.”Many leading opera companies, including the Metropolitan Opera in New York, have only recently stopped the practice of having white singers darken their skin with stage makeup to perform the title roles in “Aida” and “Otello,” long after minstrel shows, blackface roles and other types of performances that rely on makeup that echoes racist caricatures disappeared from many stages. But the practice is still common in parts of Europe and Russia, and Netrebko has been a vocal proponent of wearing dark makeup.In an interview on Friday, Blue said she was disturbed when she saw photos of the production, including some that showed dancers and singers in dark makeup, circulating on social media on Monday evening while she was in Paris for another performance.“I was shocked; I just felt really weird in my spirit,” she said. “I just felt like I couldn’t go and sing and associate myself with this tradition.”Netrebko, who is trying to rebuild her career after losing a number of engagements following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine because of her history of support for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, posted photos on her Instagram this week showing her in extremely dark makeup and braids as she sang the role of Aida, an Ethiopian princess, in Verona.One of the photos the soprano Anna Netrebko shared on Instagram of the makeup she wore in a production of “Aida” at the Arena di Verona in Italy.Soon, Netrebko’s Instagram page was flooded with more than 1,000 comments, with many people denouncing her for using makeup that they said was racist and recalled blackface. She was not the only one in “Aida” who had darkened her skin: Some of her co-stars performed in the dark makeup, as did a different cast that appeared in the opera when it opened last month.A spokesman for Netrebko did not respond to a request for comment on Friday. Netrebko has been a vocal defender of the practice, arguing that it helps maintain the authenticity of centuries-old works. When the Met tried to stop her from using makeup to darken her skin during a production of “Aida” in 2018, she went to a tanning salon instead. In 2019, appearing with dark makeup in a production of “Aida” at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, she wrote on Instagram, “Black Face and Black Body for Ethiopian princess, for Verdi greatest opera! YES!”The Arena di Verona noted in a statement that it had been performing this production of “Aida” for two decades, and that it was well known when Blue agreed to appear this summer.“Every country has different roots, and their cultural and social structures developed along different historical and cultural paths,” it said in a statement. “Sensibilities and approaches on the same subject might widely vary in different parts of the world.”It added: “We have no reason nor intent whatsoever to offend and disturb anyone’s sensibility.”While Netrebko has not addressed the recent controversy, her husband, the tenor Yusif Eyvazov, who also appeared in the production of “Aida” in Verona, lashed out at Blue. In a social media post, he called Blue’s decision “disgusting,” and questioned why she had not withdrawn last month when “Aida” opened, with a different cast that also used dark makeup. (That cast included the Ukrainian soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska as “Aida.”)Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Met, where Eyvazov is a regular performer, sent a letter to Eyvazov on Friday calling his remarks “hateful,” according to a copy of the letter obtained by The New York Times.“There is no room at the Met for artists who are so meanspirited in their thinking,” Gelb wrote in the letter.Gelb, who cut ties with Netrebko this year because of her previous support for Putin, said in an interview that he had not yet decided whether he would penalize Eyvazov. “We’re considering what steps we might take,” he said.Blue said her decision was not personal, and that she was not targeting Netrebko or her husband.“My decision doesn’t have anything to do with them,” she said in the interview. “My decision has to do with my convictions,” she added, saying that she had felt moved to take a stand against “something that is hurtful to people who look like me.”Blue said she hoped that more opera houses would eliminate blackface as they work to bring diversity to the stage.“In order to keep opera relevant in today’s society, there’s no place for blackface,” she said. “I felt hurt by what I saw because I feel like that’s a tradition that they’re trying to hold onto that hurts people.”Eyvazov’s manager said he was unavailable for comment on Friday.The decision by Blue, who has become a favorite at the Met Opera in recent seasons and who appeared this summer at the Paris Opera in Gounod’s “Faust,” was praised by many fellow singers and American opera executives.The revival of “Aida” in Verona is among Netrebko’s first staged opera engagements since her return to performing in late April as she tried to repair her career after being shunned in the United States and parts of Europe for her ties to Putin. 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      Revisiting the Pyramids’ ‘Avant-Garde African Jazz,’ Four Decades Later

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      The group that started at Antioch College in Ohio went to Africa and returned “transformed,” one of its members said. A new boxed set collects its little-heard albums from the 1970s.In the early 1970s, as many jazz musicians looked directly to Africa for rhythms and inspiration, a group of students from Antioch College pushed even further, creating music that was so overtly African, you would have thought it was coming direct from Kenya or Senegal, not a small liberal arts college in Yellow Springs, Ohio.Between 1973 and 1976, the Pyramids released their music independently and sold albums hand-to-hand to classmates and during their travels on the road. Though the group earned a smattering of fans, its music — “avant-garde African jazz,” its bassist Kimathi Asante called it in an interview — was impossible to market.“It was a little bit too much for people,” said Margaux Simmons, who played flute in the group. “We were so eager and open and we went there.”On Friday, a new boxed set titled “Aomawa: The 1970s Recordings” will mark the widest release of the Pyramids’ music to date, reintroducing the band’s first three studio albums — “Lalibela,” “King of Kings” and “Birth/Speed/Merging” — and unearthing a 1975 live session for KQED TV in San Francisco.The group’s members started to come together after its future leader, Idris Ackamoor, returned to Antioch following a work-study period in Los Angeles, where he was mentored by the saxophonist Charles Tyler. Ackamoor founded a band with Simmons called the Collective, which Asante later joined. For the next year, they played original compositions influenced by Pharoah Sanders, Cecil Taylor, mid-60s-era John Coltrane and classical music.In the fall of 1971, the three students joined the Black Music Ensemble, a group started by the free jazz pioneer Cecil Taylor, who came to teach at Antioch in the late 1960s, and began an intense period of musical training. “He would have us practice from 10 o’clock at night until 2 in the morning, seven days a week, for months on end,” Asante said. “We had chops that were just off the charts.”Nine months into their tenure with Taylor, Ackamoor had an idea: Antioch had a work-study program that allowed students to travel overseas, so he wrote a proposal to study the source of Black art. “I said, ‘I want to go to Europe, I want to form a band, and then I want to go to Africa for nine months and just study African music,’” Ackamoor recalled in a video interview.The school approved the request, requiring six weeks at a university in France. Ackamoor and Simmons flew to Paris in July 1972, where they befriended a young percussionist named Donald Robinson, who was studying there under the drummer Sunny Murray. At a university in Besançon, Ackamoor, Simmons and Asante played their first show as a trio, then played gigs around Amsterdam after Robinson officially joined the group. In France, they had lived in separate dorms that formed a triangle, giving the group its name. (An unrelated band called the Pyramids produced surf rock in the 1960s.)But the most pivotal part of the band’s journey was yet to come. After a week in Morocco and Senegal, the Pyramids spent seven months in Ghana, Kenya and Uganda, engaging in spiritual practices, playing in drumming circles and buying instruments. As Black Americans, an almost indescribable feeling set in once they landed there.Ackamoor in Ghana in 1973. He applied for a program at Antioch College that allowed students to study overseas and traveled with fellow musicians to Europe, then Africa. Margaux Simmons/Pyramids Archive“It was the sense of community,” Simmons said. “It came from a place of spirituality, rather than something just to make music.”Ackamoor said when the group was in Africa, “We just wanted to be vessels,” adding, “We wanted to take in as much as we could, and fortunately, we were blessed and we were directed to the right sources.”The Pyramids returned to Ohio “transformed,” Asante said. “We were not the people or the musicians that had left Yellow Springs a year before.” The group bolstered its sound with Moroccan clay drums, a bamboo flute and Ugandan harp, giving its music a distinct African flair.Back in Ohio, the conga player Bradie Speller joined the Pyramids, adding even more percussive depth. The band played shows on campus and even opened for the jazz fusion band Weather Report in Dayton and Cincinnati. The Pyramids emphasized theater and costumes as a part of their live shows, eschewing street clothes for colorful face paint, ornate kente cloth and interpretive dance. “We had a pageant going on,” Ackamoor said, “a ritual pageant that was a visual feast, not only for the music, but for the eyes and the movement and the dance. We were a multimedia spectacle.”There was a consciousness-raising element to the group’s music, akin to experimental jazz luminaries including the Sun Ra Arkestra and Art Ensemble of Chicago. But Ackamoor said concerns about “humankind” were top of mind. “Although we were Afrocentric, we never defined ourselves as being Afrocentric,” he said. “We, at a very early point, were talking and speaking to all languages, all colors, all races, but we were African American doing it.”The Pyramids recorded their 1973 debut, “Lalibela” — inspired by Ackamoor and Simmons’s trip to the city in Ethiopia of the same name — in a friend’s Yellow Springs living room on a four-track tape. “A lot of it was on the first take,” Asante said. “It was a very pure album.” Its 1974 follow-up, “King of Kings,” was made during a marathon all-night session at a studio in Chillicothe, Ohio. Both albums contain long percussive suites, with searing saxophone wails and upper-register flute solos that work best when played front to back without interruption. The results were daring then and now.Simmons performing as part of the Collective, a group that pre-dated the Pyramids, in 1970.Idris Ackamoor/Pyramids Archive“We were more concerned with the progression of the music and creating a sound that was our own,” Speller said in a phone interview.By the time the Pyramids recorded their third album, “Birth/Speed/Merging,” in 1976, they had moved to the Bay Area to be closer to some sort of music industry. Ackamoor’s brother, who lived in San Francisco, helped fund the LP and put the band in a studio with better facilities and multitracking equipment. The Pyramids printed 5,000 copies of the LP, but they couldn’t find a record company to distribute it. Then the group began to splinter, and members relocated around the world.The Pyramids were trying to make a living as an avant-garde band when even the most popular jazz musicians struggled to find their footing in a marketplace dominated by funk. “It got deep,” Ackamoor said. “Those early days I had to pawn my instrument, do different things to survive. We were in the serious red, and once we were out of the college environment, we ran smack up to the reality of Black creative musicians trying to survive in America.” The Pyramids opened the Berkeley Jazz Festival in 1977, then broke up.The band was defunct until 2007, when Ackamoor organized a reunion concert after fielding requests to reissue the Pyramids’ 1970s music. By then, the music had reached a new generation of listeners, and the group’s albums were selling for hundreds of dollars on eBay. Three years later, a German agency organized a European tour for the band.In the years since, Ackamoor has resurrected the group in different forms, releasing the albums “We Be All Africans” in 2016, “An Angel Fell” in 2018 and “Shaman!” under the name Idris Ackamoor & the Pyramids in 2020. But you don’t get those albums without the foundation laid by the original Pyramids in the ’70s, and the courage it took to trek into the unknown.“We were the original Do It Yourself musicians, producers, label, the whole nine yards,” Speller said. “Everything cats are doing now, we did 50 years ago.”Ackamoor isn’t done with the Pyramids yet — a new album is in the works — but he said the boxed set captures a bold moment. “It is an amazing historical document, but it’s also a living document,” he said. “The past is a wonderful thing, but I’m in the future and the band is in the future.” More

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      Adam Wade, Network Game Show Pioneer, Is Dead at 87

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      As a singer, he had three Top 10 hits in 1961. As an actor, he had a long career in film and on television. As an M.C., he broke a racial barrier.Adam Wade, a versatile, velvet-voiced crooner who scored three consecutive Billboard Top 10 hits in a single year, appeared in scores of films, plays and TV productions, and in 1975 became the first Black host of a network television game show, died on Thursday at his home in Montclair, N.J. He was 87.His wife, Jeree Wade, a singer, actress and producer, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.In May 1975, CBS announced that it would break a network television racial barrier by naming Mr. Wade the master of ceremonies of a weekly afternoon game show, “Musical Chairs.”Staged at the Ed Sullivan Theater in Manhattan and co-produced by the music impresario Don Kirshner, the program featured guest musical performances, with four contestants competing to complete the lyrics of songs and respond to questions about music. (Among the guest performers were groups like the Spinners and singers like Irene Cara.)The novelty of a Black M.C. was not universally embraced: A CBS affiliate in Alabama refused to carry the show, and hate mail poured in — including, Mr. Wade told Connecticut Public Radio in 2014, a letter from a man “saying he didn’t want his wife sitting at home watching the Black guy hand out the money and the smarts.”The show was canceled after less than five months. Still, Mr. Wade said, “It probably added 30 years to my career.”That career began while he was working as a laboratory technician for Dr. Jonas E. Salk, the developer of the polio vaccine, and a songwriter friend invited him to New York to audition for a music publisher. He first recorded for Coed Records in 1958 and two years later moved to Manhattan, where he performed with the singer Freddy Cole, the brother of his idol Nat King Cole, and, rapidly ascending the show business ladder, opened for Tony Bennett and for the comedian Joe E. Lewis at the fashionable Copacabana nightclub.“Two years ago, he was Patrick Henry Wade, a $65-a-week aide on virus research experiments in the laboratory of Dr. Jonas E. Salk at the University of Pittsburgh,” The New York Times wrote in 1961. “Today he is Adam Wade, one of the country’s rising young singers in nightclubs and on records.”That same year, he recorded three songs that soared to the upper echelons of the Billboard Hot 100 chart: “Take Good Care of Her” (which reached No. 7), “The Writing on the Wall” (No. 5) and “As if I Didn’t Know” (No. 10).Patrick Henry Wade was born on March 17, 1935, in Pittsburgh to Pauline Simpson and Henry Oliver Wade Jr. He was raised by his grandparents, Henry Wade, a janitor at the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research (now part of Carnegie Mellon University), and Helen Wade.He attended Virginia State University on a basketball scholarship, but, although he had dreamed of playing for the Harlem Globetrotters, dropped out after three years and went to work at Dr. Salk’s laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh. Undecided about whether to accept the recording contract that Coed offered, Mr. Wade consulted Dr. Salk.“He told me he had this opportunity,” Dr. Salk told The Times at the time. “I told him he must search his own soul to find out what is in him that wants to come out.”He changed his first name — because his agent said there were too many Pats in show business — and had his first hit with the song “Ruby” early in 1960. His smooth vocal style was often compared to that of Johnny Mathis, but Mr. Wade said he was primarily influenced by an earlier boyhood idol, Nat King Cole.“So I guess that tells you how good my imitating skills were,” he said.He appeared on TV on soap operas including “The Guiding Light” and “Search for Tomorrow” and sitcoms including “The Jeffersons” and “Sanford & Son.” He was also seen in “Shaft” (1971), “Come Back Charleston Blue” (1972) and other films, and onstage in a 2008 touring company of “The Color Purple.”He and his wife ran Songbird, a company that produced African American historical revues, including the musical “Shades of Harlem,” which was staged Off Broadway at the Village Gate in 1983.The couple last performed at an anniversary party this year.In addition to Ms. Wade, whom he married in 1989, he is survived by their son, Jamel, a documentary filmmaker; three children, Sheldon Wade, Patrice Johnson Wade and Michael Wade, from his marriage to Kay Wade, which ended in 1973; and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.For all his success in show business, Mr. Wade said he was particularly proud that 40 years after dropping out of college he earned a bachelor’s degree from Lehman College and a master’s in theater history and criticism from Brooklyn College, both constituents of the City University of New York. He taught speech and theater at Long Island University and at Bloomfield College in New Jersey.“I was the first one in my family to go to college,” he told Connecticut Public Radio. “I promised my grandmother back then that I would finish college someday. Many years later, I kept that promise.” More

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      ‘Accepted’ Review: Reaching for the Stars, Seeing Them Dissolve

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      After a scandal unravels at their private school in western Louisiana, four seniors pick up the pieces.In “Accepted” the director Dan Chen takes us inside the world of T.M. Landry, a Louisiana private school whose videos of African American students collecting Ivy League college acceptances once went viral. But nine months after the filmmakers’ first visit to the school, The New York Times published reports of physical abuse, falsified transcripts and “cultish” behavior on the part of its founders, Mike and Tracey Landry. Viewers of “Accepted” get a front-row seat to the life-altering impact of the school’s unraveling through the stories of four promising high school seniors: Adia, Alicia, Cathy and Issac.As we witness both the documentary’s subjects — and its director — navigate a shocking development in real time, a quietly probing film emerges that pierces the myth of American meritocracy.Chen makes the choice to plod along at the same measured pace throughout — even after the T.M Landry scandal comes to light — and forgo the cryptic scoring we’re used to hearing when the jig is up. Similarly, the cinematography by Chen and Daphne Qin Wu moves seamlessly between intimate hand-held shots and aerial views of western Louisiana landscapes that reflect the eventual loss of access to the Landrys and the school.In the end, it is the resilience of the film’s teenage subjects that lifts “Accepted” to new heights. As they sit for close-ups in front of a swirly blue backdrop, gone are the Georgetown and Stanford sweatshirts, and the hopes they once represented. But in their place sits a clear understanding of the misguided pressures placed upon individual minority students to succeed in a society that systemically disadvantages them and a surprisingly powerful tale about making peace with imperfection.AcceptedNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Lessons in Survival: 1971’ Review: The Past Echoes in the Present

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      The writer James Baldwin and the poet Nikki Giovanni are at the center of a crackling work of verbatim theater at the Vineyard Theater.If the year weren’t in the title, you might come close to guessing it from the architecture of the sunken space: a conversation pit lined with couches upholstered in burnt orange, with blood orange carpeting to match. There’s a comfort to the room, a midcentury modern hospitality that invites you to take your shoes off, have a drink, light one cigarette after another, and talk and talk as you try to set the world to rights.And so the writer James Baldwin and the poet Nikki Giovanni do in “Lessons in Survival: 1971,” a crackling work of verbatim theater starring Carl Clemons-Hopkins and Crystal Dickinson. A time-capsule excavation of a moment in 20th-century Black American activist-intellectualism, it recreates a sprawling interview that Giovanni did with Baldwin for the WNET television talk show “Soul!” when he was 47, famous and living in France, and she was 28 and just getting started.“Jimmy,” Giovanni says, in the play’s first line, “I’m — I’m really curious. Why did you move to Europe?”It’s so potent, that familiarity: calling him Jimmy, not Mr. Baldwin. Before he even opens his mouth, he becomes for us not a god visiting from the pantheon but a human being. And in the question that her question implies — Why did a continent an ocean away seem like a healthier place for you, a Black American, to live? — we hear her set up the framework for an ever-thoughtful, sometimes contentious, particularly American dialogue.Directed by Tyler Thomas at the Vineyard Theater, this engrossing 90-minute show arrives at the end of a season of civic and social reckonings on New York stages, which puts it at risk of seeming like an eat-your-vegetables experience. It is emphatically not.Conceived by Marin Ireland, Peter Mark Kendall, Reggie D. White and Thomas, and created with the theater collective the Commissary, it was presented in an earlier version online during the industry shutdown. In person, it is the kind of electric theater that charges audiences with energy: a meeting between public intellectuals wrestling rigorously with the culture, and clashing with each other along the way. The drama is built in. All we have to do is listen.The actors are listening, too, wearing earpieces that feed them the audio of the interview, whose words they speak with the original stammers and hesitations. We hear, briefly, the voices of the real Baldwin and Giovanni captured on that old recording, but the performance is about channeling their essence, not impersonating them.So it doesn’t matter, really, that Clemons-Hopkins — tall, broad-shouldered, bearded, familiar to fans of the HBO Max series “Hacks” as the endearing workaholic Marcus — has such a different physical presence than Baldwin. It’s the writer’s mind that this show is after.Dickinson is riveting as the lesser-known Giovanni, a poised young Black woman with a soft surface and a spine of steel. Respectful of Baldwin, she belongs to a different sex and generation than he does. And she challenges him on his stubborn sympathy for notions of Black manhood that she believes must change.“Be careful as a woman what you demand of a man,” he warns, but she is having none of it — a resistance that got her finger snaps of approval from the crowd at the performance I saw.Baldwin and Giovanni are united, though, in having no use for white critics, so take my admiration for this show with that grain of salt. But do go, and do pause in the lobby, where one corner has been turned into an installation by You-Shin Chen, the show’s set designer, and Matt Carlin, its props supervisor, with a loop of period video clips full of famous Black faces and retro advertising (by Josiah Davis and Attilio A. Rigotti) playing on a vintage console TV.It will transport you straight back to the era of the interview, when Giovanni and the expatriate Baldwin were determined that Black Americans should take rightful ownership of their white-run country.“I do know that we have paid too much for it to be able to abandon it,” he says, with an eye on the ancestors. “My father and my father’s fathers paid too much for it.”“I’ve paid too much for it,” she says. “I’m only 28.”Lessons in Survival: 1971Through June 30 at the Vineyard Theater, Manhattan; vineyardtheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      U.S. Orchestras Playing More Works by Women and Minorities, Report Says

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      The recent discussions over racial justice and gender disparities appear to have accelerated efforts to bring more diversity to classical music.American orchestras have long fallen short when it comes to performing compositions by women and people of color, sticking to a canon of music dominated by white, largely male composers.But the protests over racial justice and gender disparities in the United States appear to have prompted some change.Compositions by women and people of color now make up about 23 percent of the pieces performed by orchestras, up from only about 5 percent in 2015, according to a report released on Tuesday by the Institute for Composer Diversity at the State University of New York at Fredonia.The increase comes amid a concerted effort in the performing arts to promote music by women and people of color, prompted in part by the #MeToo movement and the death of George Floyd.“The change that has been talked about for a very long time has suddenly been tremendously accelerated,” Simon Woods, president and chief executive of the League of American Orchestras, which helped produce the report, said in an interview.The coronavirus pandemic, which posed a threat to many institutions, seems to have also contributed to the change. Before the pandemic started, many ensembles took a more traditional approach to programming, planning their seasons years in advance. The virus has appeared to have led to experimentation.“The pandemic has been kind of a jolt to the patterns that we’ve known for so long,” Woods said, allowing orchestras “to be much more responsive.”Over all, ensembles seem to be embracing more music written by contemporary artists. This season, works by living composers made up about 22 percent of the pieces performed by orchestras, compared with 12 percent in 2015. The report was based on data from hundreds of orchestras across the United States.Many ensembles in recent years have taken steps to nurture the composing careers of women and people of color. The New York Philharmonic, for example, in 2020 started Project 19, a multiyear initiative to commission works from 19 female composers to honor the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which brought women the right to vote.While orchestras have shown a greater willingness to program works by living composers in recent years, several obstacles remain, including that some new music is performed only once.The League of American Orchestras, aiming to make works by living composers a more permanent part of the orchestral landscape, announced an initiative last month to enlist 30 ensembles in the next several years to perform new pieces by six composers, all of them women. More

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      Boston Revisits ‘Common Ground’ and Busing, Onstage

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      The Huntington Theater Company is staging a play based on the seminal J. Anthony Lukas book, reconsidering the legacy of the busing crisis.BOSTON — It’s been nearly half a century since a federal judge ordered the city schools here desegregated by busing, and 37 years since the writer J. Anthony Lukas plumbed the resultant turmoil in his Pulitzer-winning tome, “Common Ground,” which entered the canon of seminal Boston texts.Now a leading nonprofit theater here, arguing that the shadow of busing and the depictions in “Common Ground” continue to shape this city’s reputation and its race relations, is staging a reconsideration of the book, filtered through the prism of a diverse group of contemporary artists.The play, “Common Ground Revisited,” which opened June 10 at the Huntington Theater Company, has been 11 years in the making, begun as a thought experiment in a classroom at Emerson College, and delayed, like so many stage projects, by the coronavirus pandemic. The cast is made up of Boston actors, and the work layers their observations on top of the events in the book, which follows the busing crisis through the lives of three families.“This book has a strong, vibrant legacy in Boston — many people have read it, and there are varying opinions about it and what it means,” said the playwright Kirsten Greenidge, who developed the project with Melia Bensussen; Greenidge wrote the adaptation, and Bensussen, who is the artistic director of Hartford Stage, directed it.“We’re insistent on the ‘revisited’ part,” Greenidge said. “It’s not a straight up adaptation of the book — it’s having the book be in conversation with us, in the present day.”The play, bracketed by several alternative ways of staging — and seeing — a final high school encounter between two students, one Black and one white, is not a takedown of the book, but does gently suggest that there are other historical figures whose stories also matter to Boston’s history, or, as one actor says during the play, “There’s more than one book.”The play, like the book on which it is based, depicts three families affected by busing. Cast members include Lyndsay Allyn Cox, Shanaé Burch, Omar Robinson, Elle Borders and Kadahj Bennett. T Charles Erickson“Boston, to me, as it was sold: Revolutionary War, maybe a little bit of busing, and then somehow we’re here, with ‘The Departed,’ ‘The Town’ and ‘Good Will Hunting’ sprinkled in there,” said Omar Robinson, a Baltimore native who relocated to Boston and is one of the actors in the cast. “But our actual history is so rich and multicultural and Black, and that is very frequently overlooked. Maybe not anymore, hopefully.”That history can sometimes feel very present, and sometimes very distant. The play is being staged in the city’s South End, described in “Common Ground” as “a shabbier, scruffier part of the city,” but now polished and pricey. The city, long led by white men, now has its first Asian American mayor, Michelle Wu; she followed an acting mayor, Kim Janey, who was the first Black person to hold that office, and who had been among those bused for desegregation purposes when she was a child.The school district’s demographics have also changed enormously: Today, just 14.5 percent of students in the Boston public schools are white, down from 57 percent in 1973. And the school system is about half the size it was: There are currently 48,957 students, down from 93,647. (By comparison, in New York City there are about 1 million public school students, of whom 14.7 percent are white.)Although many in the 12-person Huntington ensemble are too young to have lived through the busing crisis, it still looms large. During that era, the actress Karen MacDonald’s stepfather taught at the city’s Hyde Park High School; the actor Michael Kaye’s friend’s father was a state trooper assigned to Charlestown High School, where busing had been greeted by walkouts, protests and an attempted firebombing of the building.Kadahj Bennett, another member of the cast, noted that the events of those days had changed the course of his own schooling a generation later. “My father is an immigrant from Jamaica, moved here and he was involved in busing — he got bused to West Roxbury High and had a miserable time,” he said. “With that, my parents decided I wasn’t going to go to public school.”Theodore C. Landsmark, a city planner and scholar who now directs an urban policy research center at Northeastern University, was on his way to a meeting at Boston City Hall in 1976 when he was attacked by a man wielding an American flag. This photograph, by Stanley Forman, won a Pulitzer Prize.StanleyFormanPhotoOne striking aspect of performing a play about recent history in the city where it took place: Many people in the audience have memories of the scenes depicted, or even know some of the characters. Some nights, the actors say, patrons come up to tell them what they got wrong, or right, in portraying the city and its struggles, and to share their own memories.Some still have deeply personal connections to the history being depicted.Tito Jackson, a former Boston city councilman and mayoral candidate who now runs a cannabis company, has a particularly remarkable link: He learned a few years ago that his birth mother was Rachel E. Twymon, who was a child in one of the families featured in the book. Twymon became pregnant at age 12, and her mother insisted that the child be given up for adoption. Just last year, The Boston Globe reported that Jackson had discovered he was that child.“I read the book four or five times when I was in college — I was a history and sociology major — so finding out that my birth was in the book was a huge surprise and pretty emotional,” Jackson said in an interview. The book describes the pregnancy that led to Jackson’s birth as the result of sexual experimentation and “foolin’ around,” but Twymon said the truth is she was raped, and Jackson credits the Huntington play with making that clear.“Her life was indelibly stamped, and often framed, by this book, and, frankly, the short shrift that the book gave to a pregnancy and the birth of a child,” Jackson, who is now 47, said. “Then the folks at Emerson questioned how a 12-year-old, in 1975, with one of the strictest moms ever, got pregnant.”Jackson said of the play, “I’m very touched, and I feel that Rachel’s story — her perspective as well as her truth — was finally acknowledged.”His mother, who is now 60, is less enthusiastic, feeling that the play doesn’t sufficiently capture the horrors of the busing era. “You’re talking about a time when things were very hectic, and very unstable,” Twymon said. “The play was told nicely, and that’s not how Boston was at that time.”“Boston, to me, as it was sold: Revolutionary War, maybe a little bit of busing, and then somehow we’re here, with ‘The Departed,’ ‘The Town’ and ‘Good Will Hunting’ sprinkled in there,” said the actor Omar Robinson (foreground). T Charles EricksonAnother intense personal connection to the play is that of Theodore C. Landsmark, who now directs an urban policy research center at Northeastern University. Landsmark has had a distinguished career, but will forever be known as the Black man who was set upon by a white man wielding an American flag as a weapon in Boston’s City Hall Plaza in 1976; Stanley Forman’s photograph of the assault won a Pulitzer Prize, and came to symbolize the racism and violence of the busing era.“Initially I found it off-putting to have all of my life defined by that one moment,” Landsmark, 76, said. “Over time I’ve gotten used to it, and I recognize it’s an opportunity to talk about things I care about — the inequalities that continue to exist in Boston, particularly within our professional ranks.”Landsmark said “Common Ground” remains hugely influential. “The book is assigned to all kinds of high school and college classes as a point of entry into understanding Boston, and I know that many people look at Boston through the prism of ‘Common Ground’,” he said. “People who have never been to the city will immediately raise either the book or the photograph as a reason for their reluctance to relocate from places that are easily as racist as Boston is.”Bensussen, the director, said she wasn’t sure whether the play would have a life outside Boston, given its intensely local focus, but noted that local students were more likely to study the national Civil Rights movement than the Boston busing crisis, and said she was hopeful that the play might prompt some rethinking of that. Landsmark said he could imagine excerpts from the play being staged in a variety of settings to spark discussion about ongoing forms of segregation.As for the actors, several of them said they wanted to feel optimistic that progress is underway, but were torn about whether that is realistic given the state of the nation today.“I want there to be hope, but it’s not a thing I see every day — it’s not a thing I’ve encountered during my nearly 20 years in the city,” Robinson said. “Reading this book, working on this, it shined a bright light on its past, and therefore its present, in a lot of ways for me. Not just here in Boston — this country has got a loaded history. But I hope for hope.” More