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      Michelle Materre, Champion of Black Independent Film, Dies at 67

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      Through her distribution company and an educational series, Ms. Materre was for decades a tireless advocate for underrepresented filmmakers.Michelle Materre, a distributor and educator who promoted Black women’s voices in film and released influential independent movies by Black creators, died on March 11 in White Plains, N.Y. She was 67.A friend, Kathryn Bowser, said the cause was oral cancer.Ms. Materre was an early proponent of independently released works by Black female directors, beginning at a time when diversity in independent film was far from the forefront of the cultural conversation.Her company, KJM3 Entertainment Group, worked on distribution for major films; one of its first projects was the marketing of Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust.” Widely viewed as a masterpiece of Black independent cinema and said to have been the first feature film by a Black woman to have a wide release, “Daughters of the Dust” was inducted into the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry in 2004.The New York Times critic A.O. Scott wrote in 2020 that “Daughters of the Dust,” which tells the story of Gullah women off the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia in the early 20th century, “has sent ripples of influence through the culture,” inspiring the imagery in Beyoncé’s visual album “Lemonade” and the director Sofia Coppola’s aesthetic. Ava DuVernay, the director of “Selma,” also regularly cites the film as an influence.Ms. Dash, in a remembrance for the International Documentary Association, wrote, “We remain forever grateful for Michelle and team KJM3 for the initial run of ‘Daughters of the Dust’ in 1992; it would not have been a success without them.”From left, Barbara-O Jones, Trula Hoosier and Alva Rogers in Julie Dash’s ‘“Daughters of the Dust,” one of the first films handled by Ms. Materre’s distribution company, KJM3 Entertainment Group.Cohen Media Group/Everett CollectionKJM3 Entertainment was formed in 1992 and released 23 films before it ceased operation in 2001. Another of the company’s most influential distribution efforts was “L’Homme Sur Les Quais” (“The Man by the Shore”) (1993), a drama by Raoul Peck, the Haitian auteur who went on to direct “I Am Not Your Negro,” the 2016 documentary about race in America based on the writings of James Baldwin.Ms. Materre’s passion for bringing unsung masterworks to wider audiences animated her career. In 1999, she started Creatively Speaking, an effort to package short films from underrepresented filmmakers into full-length programs organized thematically. It has grown into a major cultural player, holding regular screenings at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and educational panels about diversity in filmmaking at the New School and elsewhere.“One Way or Another: Black Women’s Cinema, 1970-1991,” which compiled short films into a longer project, was one acclaimed Creatively Speaking project. In 2017, The New Yorker’s Richard Brody called it the most important repertory series of the year.In a 2019 interview for the New School, Ms. Materre said she started Creatively Speaking because she saw a lack of opportunity — a theme throughout her career.“I found that there weren’t very many outlets for filmmakers of color and women filmmakers who hadn’t reached the possibility of making feature films yet,” she said. “They were making short films — all these amazing short films, but nobody was ever seeing them.”Once she began producing these films, she added, “people gravitated towards them like crazy.”In the International Documentary Association tribute, Leslie Fields-Cruz, the executive director of Black Public Media, wrote that Ms. Materre “understood why Black films need special attention when it comes to distribution and engagement.”“There are multiple generations of filmmakers, curators, distributors and media arts administrators,” she wrote, “whose lives and careers have been impacted simply because Michelle took the time to listen and to care.”Ms. Materre, right, with Kathryn Bowser of KJM3 Entertainment, left, and Kay Shaw of the National Black Programming Consortium at the premiere of the film “Follow Me Home” in New York in 1997. Ozier Muhammad/The New York TimesMichelle Angelina Materre was born on May 12, 1954, in Chicago. Her father, Oscar Materre, was a Chicago firefighter and owned a paint business. Her mother, Eloise (Michael) Materre, was a real estate agent.She grew up in Chicago and attended the Chicago Latin School. She then earned a B.S. in education from Boston State College and a master’s in educational media from Boston College.In 1975, she married Jose Masso, a Boston public-school teacher. They divorced in 1977. She married Dennis Burroughs, a production technician, in 1990; that marriage, too, ended in divorce. She is survived by her sisters, Paula and Judi Materre. Ms. Materre’s work at Creatively Speaking was centered in New York City; in addition to distributing films, she often organized panels and screenings of little-seen works like “Charcoal” (2017), the Haitian director Francesca Andre’s short film on colorism and skin lightening practices in the Black community.Ms. Materre consulted on the production and distribution of numerous films and served on the boards of the Black Documentary Collective, New York Women in Film and Television, and other groups promoting underrepresented filmmakers.In 2000 she began teaching at the New School in New York City, where her courses focused on diversity and inclusion in media.In a remembrance for The New School Free Press, Ms. Materre’s colleague Terri Bowles, with whom she taught a course at the New School, wrote, “She radiated a love of media and cinema, immersing her students, colleagues and friends in the vernaculars of the image, its myriad presentations and its critical importance.” More

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      Using Film to Tell a Personal History of America and Race

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      With “Who We Are,” the lecturer Jeffery Robinson and the directors Emily and Sarah Kunstler follow in the tradition of documentaries that excavate our past.For over a decade, Jeffery Robinson has been telling an unvarnished history of the United States in an ever-evolving lecture presentation. His talks, now presented as part of his organization, the Who We Are Project, delve into how racism against Black people was bound up with the country’s legacy since its founding. The new documentary, “Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America,” captures Robinson’s eye-opening account (filmed at Town Hall in New York City) and intersperses interviews with civil rights figures and others from his travels across the country.The film, directed by Emily and Sarah Kunstler, joins a lineage of documentaries that excavate race and the histories of marginalized people in America, like Raoul Peck’s “I Am Not Your Negro” and Ava DuVernay’s “13th.”“This is not ‘Eyes on the Prize,’” Robinson said of the new movie, which is available on major digital platforms. “But I think it is a call to us being something radically different going forward.”Reviewing “Who We Are” for The Times, Ben Kenigsberg made it a Critic’s Pick and wrote, “It’s a confrontational film, but never an alienating one.”Robinson, a criminal defense lawyer by profession, was the director of the A.C.L.U.’s Trone Center for Justice and Equality in New York, and he remembers walking past the former Cotton Exchange on the way to work. I spoke with him and the Kunstlers (whose last feature, “William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe,” was about their father, the civil rights attorney). These are excerpts from our interview.“Who We Are” partly aims to chart the role of white supremacy in U.S. history. How did you approach that?JEFFERY ROBINSON I say it as a rhetorical question in the film: “What if I said America was founded on white supremacy? Somebody might say, ‘Jeff, that’s really extreme.’” But when you read the words of the people that founded our country and see what they did, I think it’s an inescapable conclusion. Some people have said the Constitution was a compromise between those who wanted slavery and those who didn’t want slavery. This “compromise” protected the institution of slavery, gave the South extra congressional representatives and Electoral College votes to protect the institution of slavery, and made Black attempts to be free unconstitutional. It was unconstitutional for me to try and get away from my owner!SARAH KUNSTLER And they accomplished all of that without using the word slavery. We have a history of hiding what we mean as a country. When we enact laws preserving and maintaining white supremacy, we don’t actually say what it is that we’re doing.ROBINSON There is no way you can associate white supremacy with a law that says you cannot change the name of iconic monuments in the state of Alabama — until you understand that these are all monuments to slavery, essentially, and to people that enslaved people.Robinson with Josephine Bolling McCall, the author of a book about her father’s lynching in Alabama in 1947.Jesse Wakeman/Sony Pictures ClassicsThe film also uncovers the details of lived Black experience: for example, the fingerprints that enslaved builders left behind on walls they made.EMILY KUNSTLER The facts in the abstract don’t mean anything if you can’t connect them to actual human experience. Those fingerprints are one example of a monument to a history of lived experience of enslaved Black people in Charleston, S.C., and in fact, all over this country, that despite the best efforts to erase them, persist. The same way the foundations for the houses in Tulsa, Okla., [site of the 1921 massacre], still exist where the homes were never rebuilt.ROBINSON There was a moment when we were talking with Mother Randle [a survivor of the Tulsa massacre] and she was saying, “There was a pile of bodies.” There was just a chill that went up and down my spine — this woman over 100 years old going back to that memory in her life.Jeffery, how did it feel to share your, and your family’s, experiences of racism, like the school basketball game where the hosts didn’t want you to play?ROBINSON We went to Dr. Tiffany Crutcher and asked her to talk about her feelings about her brother being killed on live television, practically, by the Tulsa police [in 2016]. And it felt like, All right, I should share something. Dick [a basketball coach who stuck up for Robinson] was 21 years old at the time this incident happened in Walls, Miss. This is just several years after civil rights workers got disappeared and murdered in Mississippi. Where he got the courage to handle that the way he did, I just don’t know. But it was clear that if I didn’t play, we were all leaving. And he wasn’t going to put that on me at 12 years old. I think he saw me as essentially his younger brother.Could you talk about including the conversation about slavery with a man you encountered at a Confederate statue who represented Flags Across the South, the pro-Confederate flag group?EMILY KUNSTLER I felt like it encompassed the thesis of the film. I asked Jeff, “Do you think that that gentleman could be reached?” And Jeff said, “I don’t know if he can be reached, but I know that if nobody tries, he certainly won’t be.” There’s value in making the effort, there’s value in laying out the facts and continuing to do so. We can’t be frightened into silence by people who think differently, speak very loudly, and come out in force and wave Confederate flags.ROBINSON The conversation didn’t go the way he perhaps thought it was going to go in terms of me getting angry at him or something. There’s a little twitch in his face as we were leaving, and I think we at least made some wheels turn in his head.How does the movie relate to the controversy around laws banning the teaching of certain American history?ROBINSON The first time we met in person to talk about this [movie] was June 20, 2017. No one was even talking about CRT [Critical Race Theory] back then. It would have been like, “What is that, a breakfast cereal or something?” So this was not done in response to those laws. But those laws coming up can tell you how afraid people are of the information that’s in this film.This goes to the concept of “the minds of the rising generation.” All the way back in 1837, John C. Calhoun, one of the most virulent racists in American history, was saying that we can’t teach children in school about the abolition of slavery, because if we teach that, slavery is done for. The day before the [Trump] administration left office, they put out something called “The 1776 Report” that talked about a return to patriotic education, and they use the exact same quote that John C. Calhoun did: “the minds of the rising generation.”SARAH KUNSTLER Before there were anti-CRT laws, there were textbook wars. So there’s an unending battle of what and how much our children are taught in school about our nation’s history. One of the most compelling things about Jeff’s talk is that he goes back to primary sources. You don’t need to just learn it in school. You can seek it out for yourself. More

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      Will Smith’s Full Oscars Speech for Best Actor 

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      Will Smith, who started his acting career in 1990 in an after-school special on ABC and became one of Hollywood’s most bankable and prolific action stars and producers, finally achieved the one thing that had always eluded him: He won an Oscar.Moments earlier, Smith had brought the ceremony to an awkward standstill by striding onstage from his seat and — in what at first seemed like a preplanned bit — hitting Chris Rock, who had just cracked a joke about Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith. (“Jada, I love you. G.I. Jane 2, can’t wait,” Rock had said, an apparent reference to her short-cropped hair.)Smith then returned to his seat and angrily shouted twice at Rock to not utter his wife’s name, using an expletive that was bleeped by ABC. A rattled Rock tried to regain his composure, and a stunned audience, both in the theater and at home, tried to figure out what happened. “Right now, we’re moving on with love,” Sean Combs said, arriving onstage soon afterward to introduce a celebratory montage from “The Godfather.”Smith was celebrated for his performance in “King Richard” as the fiery, flawed coach and father of the tennis legends Venus and Serena Williams — mirroring best actor wins at major film awards ceremonies this year, including the Critics Choice Awards and the Screen Actors Guild Awards.“Richard Williams was a fierce defender of his family,” an emotional Smith said in his acceptance speech. “In this time in my life, in this moment, I am overwhelmed by what God is calling on me to do and be in this world.”He went on to apologize to the academy and to his fellow nominees, but not to Rock. “This is a beautiful moment,” Smith said. “And I’m not crying for winning an award. It’s not about winning an award for me, it’s about being able to shine a light on all of the people.”Smith was previously nominated for best actor in 2007 for “The Pursuit of Happyness” and in 2002 for “Ali.” Rather incredibly, given the lack of diversity in the movie business, he lost to a Black actor in both instances: first to Denzel Washington and then to Forest Whitaker.In 2016, however, Smith became part of the #OscarsSoWhite movement. After nominating only white actors and actresses for its awards in 2015, drawing widespread criticism, the academy did it again the next year — overlooking performances like the one Smith gave in “Concussion.” Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, was outspoken about what many people saw as an urgent need for the academy to become more inclusive. Smith was less pointed in his criticism, but joined her in a boycott of the ceremony. In the years since, the academy has dramatically expanded its voting membership.Also nominated for best actor on Sunday were Washington (“The Tragedy of Macbeth”), Javier Bardem (“Being the Ricardos”), Benedict Cumberbatch (“The Power of the Dog”) and a hard-campaigning Andrew Garfield (“Tick, Tick … Boom!”).Here is Smith’s entire acceptance speech:Oh, man. Richard Williams was a fierce defender of his family. In this time in my life, in this moment, I am overwhelmed by what God is calling on me to do and be in this world. Making this film, I got to protect Aunjanue Ellis, who is one of the most strongest, most delicate people I’ve ever met. I got to protect Saniyya [Sidney] and Demi [Singleton], the two actresses that played Venus and Serena.I’m being called on in my life to love people and to protect people and to be a river to my people. I know to do what we do, you got to be able to take abuse, you got to be able to have people talk crazy about you. In this business you got to be able to have people disrespecting you, and you got to smile and pretend like that’s OK. But Richard Williams, and what I loved — thank you, D. — Denzel [Washington] said to me a few minutes ago, he said, “At your highest moment, be careful. That’s when the devil comes for you.”It’s like, I want to be a vessel for love. I want to say thank you to Venus and Serena — I just spit, I hope they didn’t see that on TV — I want to say thank you to Venus and Serena and the entire Williams family for entrusting me with your story. That’s what I want to do. I want to be an ambassador for that kind of love and care and concern.I want to apologize to the Academy. I want to apologize to all my fellow nominees. This is a beautiful moment, and I’m not crying for winning an award. It’s not about winning an award for me. It’s about being able to shine light on all of the people: Tim [White] and Trevor [White] and Zach [Baylin] and Saniyya and Demi and Aunjanue and the entire cast and crew of “King Richard” and Venus and Serena, the entire Williams family. Art imitates life. I look like the crazy father, just like they said. I look like the crazy father, just like they said about Richard Williams. But love will make you do crazy things.To my mother, a lot of this moment is really complicated for me, but to my mother — she didn’t want to come out; she has her knitting friends, she has a knitting crew that she’s in Philly watching with. Being able to love and care for my mother and my family and my wife. I’m taking up too much time. Thank you for this honor. Thank you for this moment. And thank you on behalf of Richard and Oracene [Price] and the entire Williams family. Thank you. I hope the Academy invites me back. Thank you.Nancy Coleman More

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      Review: ‘Confederates’ Talks Race in Double Time

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      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

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      ‘Help’ Review: Blindfolds (and Kid Gloves) Off. Let’s Analyze Whiteness.

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      Claudia Rankine’s heady new play dares white audiences to deny the realities of their social advantages.In July 2019, The New York Times Magazine published an essay by the poet and author Claudia Rankine titled, “I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked.” A first-person investigation of white dominance and its broad range of social consequences, Rankine’s essay prompted more than 2,000 online comments, including many defensive replies from white readers.The essay, and the responses it generated, form the basis of her heady and pointed new play, “Help,” which opened on Thursday night at the Shed (which commissioned the play). Part polemic, part documentary theater, “Help” does not so much dramatize Rankine’s argument as dissect it, coolly daring white audiences to deny the live presentation of empirical evidence.The Narrator, played by April Matthis, speaks into a microphone, introducing herself as “a representative of my category,” or what she says is the 8 percent of the United States population who identify as Black women. A glass wall separates Matthis from what looks like an airport waiting area, where nine white men and two white women are arranged in business attire (costumes are by Dede Ayite). We’re in what the Narrator calls a liminal space that people move through on their way from here to there, one full of imaginative possibilities.It was in first-class cabins and airport lounges where Rankine originally conducted her social experiment, trying to loosen the blindfold she often found white men wore to the realities of their social advantages. A few of those incidents are recreated here, including the men’s predictable knee-jerk reactions (“I’ve worked hard for everything I have,” “I don’t see color”), and Rankine’s incisive dressings-down, often left partially unspoken in the moment.From left: Charlotte Bydwell, O’Keefe and Nick Wyman in the play at the Shed.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesBut much of the play’s primary dialogue is between the narrator’s critical oration and the indignant responses Rankine received to her essay, which ensemble members recite directly to the audience. (In a 2020 interview, Rankine said that 90 percent of what’s said by white men in the play comes from these letters.)Rankine assumes the perspective of all Black women as a bold rhetorical gesture, to indict the presumed neutrality of whiteness and call out its ramifications. (“I, the Black woman, am just meant to get on with the program of accommodating white people,” Matthis tells the audience.) In doing so, the playwright also resists including herself as a character onstage, despite casting herself as its Narrator. The result is an exercise in performance more academic than it is dramatic.To illustrate and historicize her points, Rankine also includes actual remarks from public figures, from Martha Washington and Thomas Jefferson to Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump. Indeed, it’s possible to read the play exclusively as a rebuttal to incendiary rants from the former president, adding to the sense that “Help” relitigates the past more than it confronts the present.Matthis, an invaluable asset to recent Off Broadway productions exploring Black lives and histories, including “Fairview” and “Toni Stone,” is an unwavering orator, both determined and persuasive as Rankine’s stand-in. But she has little emotion to play beyond simmering frustration. Even in conversation with her husband, who is white, the Narrator speaks almost entirely in ideas, forgoing an opportunity to complicate her argument with the illogic of desire. How does it feel to challenge white men in the public square when you have one living at home? And how might the playwright’s proximity to whiteness color the reception to her case?Matthis, right, with, from left: Nick Wyman, Scholl, Barbagallo and O’Keefe.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesDirected by Taibi Magar, the production has a clinical slickness that holds its subject — the fictions people create to distance themselves from one another — at a chilled remove. (The air travel aesthetic and metaphor eventually overstay their welcome.) Sitting in high-backed blue airplane seats, the white actors wheel themselves across the cold-gray floor and into various formations, frozen in tableau or starkly lit in jerky gesticulation (set design is by Mimi Lien and lighting by John Torres). Occasionally, they perform frenetic choreography by Shamel Pitts, curious fits of movement that make a play for expressiveness but feel disconnected from the rest of the production.“Help” was in early previews when theaters closed in March 2020, and a version of the play streamed online. Rankine has since revised the text to include references to the pandemic and the killings of George Floyd, Tony McDade and others precipitating the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s possible that white audience members who see Rankine’s play may be provoked by its tenets, on an intellectual, if not an emotional level. (More than one program note expressly states that “Help” is intended for white audiences.)But a treatise on the tyranny of white privilege and ignorance would have felt more prescient before the summer of 2020, when anti-racist books topped best seller lists — and white people at least promised to read them — as the United States witnessed one of the most widespread protest movements in its history.For audiences of any color without delusions about the fundamentals of racism and its pervasive, deadly constructs, Rankine’s lecture, however essential, may seem a redundant lesson. If theater has the potential to embody hard truths, “Help” spells them out in familiar black-and-white rather than lifting them off the page.HelpThrough April 10 at the Shed, Manhattan; theshed.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Comedy Undercut ‘The Life.’ Billy Porter Looks for Its Humanity.

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      The actor is directing an Encores! revival of the 1997 musical, updating it to confront hard truths about racism, poverty and carceral injustice.When “The Life” opened on Broadway in 1997, the sex trade in Times Square that it depicts was no longer a prominent feature of the area. Like an increasingly polished Midtown Manhattan, the musical, about the women and men who once made it a prostitution capital, was sufficiently family-friendly for my parents to take me to see it, at the age of 15, as my first Broadway show.We came to New York to see “Rent,” Jonathan Larson’s portrait of la vie bohème, which had opened the previous year. After reading newspaper listings, my father chose “The Life” as another show for us to catch while in town. And despite its ostensibly R-rated subject matter (which we assume he somehow overlooked), it was perhaps no more adult in theme than “Rent.” Set circa 1980, “The Life” is also about lovers and strivers doing their best to survive a harsh and unforgiving city.But the Broadway production of “The Life” shared more DNA with droll Gotham fables like “Guys and Dolls” and “Sweet Charity,” another musical about dreams of escaping the sex trade composed, some 30 years earlier, by Cy Coleman, whose score for “The Life” is filled with magnetic melodies and brassy hooks. A hybrid comedy-drama, “The Life” was jazzy and jaunty, with a touch of vaudeville and the blues.Porter with Ledisi, the soul and jazz singer who is taking on the role played by Lillias White in the original 1997 production.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesWith lyrics by Ira Gasman, and a book by Coleman, Gasman and David Newman, “The Life” imagined the sex workers who populated Times Square as showbiz types with verve and moxie. (Vincent Canby’s critic’s essay in The New York Times praised the production’s “go-for-broke pizazz.”) Propelled by electric performances, “The Life” was nominated for 12 Tony Awards and won two, for best featured actor in a musical (Chuck Cooper) and for best featured actress in a musical (Lillias White, whose volcanic rendition of “The Oldest Profession” was the first time I’d witnessed a show-stopping ovation).Though my life could not have been further from “The Life,” there was a restlessness and defiance to the characters that I recognized in my own, as the gay son of immigrants growing up in a mostly white Michigan suburb. Listening to the cast recording, I channeled my angst and alienation into songs like “My Body” and “Why Don’t They Leave Us Alone,” anthems of autonomy and self-determination.Lillias White received a Tony Award for her portrayal of a sex worker in the Broadway production of “The Life.”Associated PressAnd while I could easily relate to yearning for love and escape, “The Life” was not the lesson in hard truths — about racism, poverty and carceral injustice — that it might have been. Though the musical ended in tragedy, comedy kept the so-called hookers and pimps, and their dire straits, at a wry remove. The characters seemed designed for the purposes of entertainment, not to inspire understanding of their interiority and circumstances.“The comedy was doing the storytelling a disservice,” said Billy Porter, who has reconceived a new production of “The Life” for New York City Center’s Encores! series. The show, which begins performances on Wednesday, will be his Encores! directorial debut.The ensemble members Tanairi Vazquez and Jeff Gorti during a recent rehearsal.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesLike most writers working on Broadway at the time, the creators of “The Life” were white men; their story didn’t ask audiences to consider why its mostly Black characters, many of whom are women, were trapped to begin with — only that they wanted out. With his revision, Porter, 52, said he intended to make “The Life” a darker and more clear-eyed drama, humanizing its characters and foregrounding their social disadvantages.Porter, who last year concluded his run as Pray Tell on the FX series “Pose,” played a principal role in early developmental workshops of “The Life” but was not ultimately cast when the show moved to Broadway. He says he believes in the purity of its creators’ intentions. “They wanted to be allies, and they were,” he told me during a lunch break at a recent rehearsal. “The music is extraordinary, that’s why we’re doing it at all.” Still, he noted that this story was problematic in the absence of more context.In reimagining the show, Porter said the humor would come from the characters’ often painful truths. Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesEncores! first approached Porter about directing “The Life” in early 2020; inequalities exposed by the pandemic and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement have only fueled the urgency behind his vision for the show. “We have to make sure everybody understands that there are systems of oppression and erasure and caste in place, where if you’re born in a system, you stay in that system,” he said. “We can’t unsee it anymore.”The plot remains largely intact, but characters stuck in “The Life” are presented in more fleshed-out detail — not only with back stories and more vivid inner lives, but with fates beyond the action onstage. Much of this information comes from the narrator, Jojo, originally played by the white actor Sam Harris. In Porter’s iteration, the role has been expanded and will be played by Destan Owens, who is Black. “I wanted the narration to be told through our eyes and our voice,” Porter said.Reflecting on the summer of 1980, when New York City was on the verge of bankruptcy, Jojo tells the audience, “We were all like crabs in a barrel,” scratching and clawing to get out. (Jojo made it to Los Angeles, he says, where he now runs his own P.R. firm.)Porter’s revision has the support of Cy Coleman’s estate, as the musical isn’t often produced because of its mature content. Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThere’s Fleetwood (Ken Robinson), a Vietnam veteran succumbing to the city’s crack epidemic, and his lover Queen (Alexandra Grey), who learns that her cash from turning tricks has not been going to their escape fund. There’s Memphis (Antwayn Hopper), the fly, ruthless kingpin who drives a wedge between them for his own gain. And there’s the worn out and weary Sonja (Ledisi, in the role originated by White), whose character has been deepened from soulful comic relief into a tragic harbinger of what’s to come.Where the original subtly hinted that Sonja is suffering from H.I.V., the first cases of which were diagnosed around the time “The Life” is set, Porter foregrounds her declining health, adding a scene in which the women receive supportive services at a community clinic. That’s where Queen, who is transgender in Porter’s revision, also receives hormone treatments. To Porter, these aspects of the characters’ lives come with the clarity of hindsight.The music of “The Life” also aims to be more reflective of post-disco New York, in new orchestrations and arrangements by James Sampliner. While honoring Coleman’s original melodies, Sampliner said the revival’s sound, which he called “down and funky,” would be far from the original’s big-band jazz, citing sonic influences like Earth, Wind & Fire, the O’Jays, Chaka Khan and Isaac Hayes. “It’s just got stank all over it,” he said.“It’s going to be a full gag,” Porter said of the production. “Even when it’s dark, that’s our job.”Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThe Encores! series, which began its first season under new leadership last month with “The Tap Dance Kid,” has long welcomed substantial revisions to its short-running revivals of American musicals (as the book is often the problem with those rarely seen). But preserving original orchestrations and arrangements has also been part of its mission, so “The Life” represents an artistic departure.It is also the first of what the artistic director, Lear DeBessonet, and the producing creative director, Clint Ramos, call an auteur slot, giving artists like Porter the encouragement to reimagine works from their personal perspective. Porter’s revision has the support of Coleman’s estate, as the musical isn’t often produced because of its mature content.Will “The Life” still have laughs? “It’s going to be a full gag,” Porter said, adding that he considers himself a hopeful entertainer. “Even when it’s dark, that’s our job.” The humor won’t be put on to make anyone feel more comfortable, he added. Rather, it will come from the often painful truths of the situation (like Sonja asking for a doctor’s note to show her pimp).The grit and perseverance that women like Sonja and Queen taught me at a young age remains as well — lessons perhaps rendered more poignant by a fuller picture of the odds stacked against them. And “The Life” may also speak with hard-fought wisdom for troubled times, to a city emerging from another difficult chapter.“We choose hope, not because things are joyful or hopeful,” Porter said. “But in order to live.” More

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      Jane Campion and the Perils of the Backhanded Compliment

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      Jane Campion’s comment about Venus and Serena Williams reminded our critic of his own night of ‘botched fanciness’ and racial slights.Something about the way the director Jane Campion went overboard on Sunday to identify with, then insult, Venus and Serena Williams at an awards show brought to mind a night of botched fanciness that happened to me. A couple Fridays ago, I went to see some art: a Faith Ringgold retrospective at the New Museum in the afternoon, with friends; Norm Lewis singing at Carnegie Hall in the evening. (That was a solo trip.) For both, I wore a suit.The Ringgold show requires three floors and includes her 1967 masterpiece “American People Series #20: Die,” a blunt, bloody racial-rampage frieze that would be pure physical comedy about the era’s racial cataclysms were it not for the helpless terror in the faces she’s painted (Black men, women and children; white men, women and children). The scale of the canvas helps. It’s huge. Ringgold has always painted Black women in a range of moods, feelings, conditions, beauty. She gives them faces that feature both personal serenity and indicting alarm.I planted myself in a tight corridor that featured three works at the alarm end of things — the “Slave Rape” trio, from 1972. Each is a warm, sizable canvas of a woman nude and agape, framed by patchwork quilting, a signature of Ringgold. I was taking my time with one called “Slave Rape #2: Run You Might Get Away” — the woman is mid-flight, loosely shrouded by leaves, a big gold ring in each ear — when two strangers (women, white) parked themselves between me and the piece and continued a conversation I had heard them having in an adjacent gallery. They noticed neither me nor the depicted distress nor my engagement with it. I waited more than a minute before waving my hand, a gesture that seemed to irritate them.“Is something wrong?,” one stranger asked.“You’re in my way,” I told her.“Please accept our deepest apologies,” said her friend. If a middle ground exists between sincerity and sarcasm, these two had just planted a flag. But they did move, though not immediately, lest I relish some kind of relocation victory, and kept their talk of real estate and art ownership within earshot.The Faith Ringgold painting “American People Series #20: Die,” from 1967, in an  exhibition at the New Museum.Faith Ringgold/ARS, NY; Simbarashe Cha for The New York TimesAfter a drink with my friends I left for Carnegie Hall. A cab made sense. One pulled up, and the driver (male, brown) took a look at me, then noticed a white woman hailing a taxi up ahead and drifted her way, instead. When I jogged over to ask him what just happened — Is something wrong? — I was given no acknowledgment in the way only a guilty cabby can achieve. I chased the car half a block to photograph a plate number that you’d have to be Weegee to get just right. I’m not Weegee.I’d never been to Carnegie Hall. And I liked the idea that Norm Lewis was going to break me in. He played Olivia Pope’s senator ex on “Scandal” and one of the vets in Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods.” He’s got a luscious, flexible baritone that I’d only ever encountered in recorded concerts on PBS. That night, backed by the New York Pops, he gave Stephen Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Marvin Gaye the polished jewel treatment and pumped “Ya Got Trouble” with enough breathless gusto to make you wonder, with all due respect to Hugh Jackman, why the current “Music Man” revival isn’t starring him.As a solo performer, this was Lewis’s first show at Carnegie Hall, too. And people were anxious to see him and their beloved Pops. In a queue in the lobby before the show, one such person (woman, white) was making a point to push past me when I turned to ask if she was all right.“We’re going to will-call,” she said of herself and the gentleman she was with.“Ma’am, I think we all are,” I said.“We’re members. Are you?” she asked.I lied, hoping a yes would stanch her aggression.“Of the Pops?”She had me.“I like Norm Lewis,” I told her.“We love the Pops.”Venus Williams, left, and Serena Williams at the Critics Choice Awards; “King Richard,” a movie about their family, earned a best actor award for Will Smith.Frazer Harrison/Getty ImagesI was thinking about my night out a week later when one of the world’s great filmmakers saluted two of the world’s greatest athletes in an acceptance speech at the Critics Choice Awards. Jane Campion had been given the directing prize for a sneaky-deep ranch drama called “The Power of the Dog.” From the stage, Campion (woman, white) saluted Venus and Serena Williams and announced that she had taken up tennis but her body had told her to stop. In her nervous excitement, Campion was charming. She then took curious note of her plight as a woman in the film industry by informing the Williamses that they’ve got nothing on her. “You are such marvels,” she said, through a grin. “However, you do not play against the guys like I have to.”The Williams sisters were in the room that evening because a smart, tangy movie about their family, “King Richard,” was in the nominations mix, alongside Campion’s. “King Richard” is not about the time in 2001 when a California crowd booed and slurred Venus and Serena and their father, Richard, at a top tennis tournament. It’s not about the many mischaracterizations of their bodies, skills and intent in the press and by their peers. It’s not about the insidiously everlasting confusion of one sister for the other, the sort of thing that, just a few weeks ago, took place on a page of this newspaper. It’s not even about their fight, Venus’s particularly, to get women’s prize money even with men’s “King Richard” is about how the sisters’ parents molded and loved and coached them into the sort of people who can handle sharp backhands and backhanded compliments with the same power and poise.Even though Campion’s errant backhand had flown wide, the room lurched into cheers. Some of the applause came from Serena Williams, who has watched many a shot sail long. I had to desist further thought about the meaning of Campion’s aside. It was too confused. Was this a wish for the establishment of gendered guardrails for directors at award shows or the elimination of such distinctions in sports? Are there no men to be contended with in tennis? The line separating argument from accusation and accusation from self-aggrandizement was murky. I thought instead about the costs of the murk.Sunday afternoon, the Williamses got dressed up to celebrate some art. And somebody stood before them and challenged the validity of their membership, here in Campion’s restricted vision of sisterhood. The next day, Campion gushed an apology. These slips and slights and presumptions have a way of lingering, though. Their underlying truth renders them contrition-proof. I had every intention of keeping my date with Faith and Norm to myself. These incidents aren’t rare in fancyland, and therefore don’t warrant a constant spotlight because standing in its glare is exhausting. But Venus. Her face does something as Campion speaks. A knowing cringe. She and her family came out to soak up more of the praise being lavished on art about their life. They were invitees turned, suddenly, into interlopers, presenting one minute, plunged through a trap door the next. Faith Ringgold would recognize the discomfort. She painted it over and over. Run you might get away. But you probably won’t. More

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      The Artists Turning Nina Simone’s Childhood Home Into a Creative Destination

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      Rashid Johnson, Julie Mehretu, Adam Pendleton and Ellen Gallagher are working both to preserve and transform the North Carolina house where she was born.IN 1997, WHEN he was 20 years old, the New York-based artist Rashid Johnson traveled with a friend from their hometown, Chicago, to Ghana, on a pilgrimage to the final resting place of the most prominent Black intellectual of the 20th century, W.E.B. Du Bois. Arriving in Accra, Johnson enacted a ritual familiar to Black Americans across generations: that of searching for home in a lost ancestral past. More than 30 years earlier, in 1961, Du Bois, disillusioned after a life spent fighting Jim Crow racism, had left the United States for Ghana at the invitation of the Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah. Two years later, he became a Ghanaian citizen, and on Aug. 27, 1963, the eve of the March on Washington, he died. “I remember just being in this house and feeling his presence,” Johnson, now 45, recalls.T’s Spring Design Issue: A Place to Make ArtWhere creativity lives, from Los Angeles to the German countryside.- Located on the grounds of a former agricultural collective an hour north of Berlin, the artist Danh Vo’s farmhouse brings together all kinds of creative talents.- Inspired by Nina Simone’s invaluable legacy, the artists Rashid Johnson, Julie Mehretu, Adam Pendleton and Ellen Gallagher decided to purchase and preserve her childhood home.- It was a hands-on renovation of one couple’s Greenwich Village apartment that prompted them to start designing home goods.- The focal points of this Edwardian townhouse in northwest London? The eccentric bathrooms.Five years ago, Johnson partnered with three other prominent Black American artists — the conceptualist Adam Pendleton, the abstract painter Julie Mehretu and the collagist and filmmaker Ellen Gallagher — to help bring another towering ancestor into focus: the genre-defying musical performer and civil rights activist Nina Simone. Simone’s childhood home, located in Tryon, N.C., a small town of 1,600 nestled at the base of the southern escarpment of the Blue Ridge Mountains, was at risk of succumbing to age and neglect. Once the artists were made aware of this, they bought the house, for $95,000, in 2017. The following year, the National Trust for Historic Preservation designated it a national treasure.The French historian Pierre Nora invented the concept of les lieux de mémoire, “sites of memory” — be they places or personas, objects or concepts — that contribute to the symbolic coherence of a nation’s identity. In 2022, much as in the 1960s when Simone answered the call to activism, the United States is openly contesting its collective identity. Some seek a return to an imagined America whose greatness depends on selective erasure of its diverse and complex history. “We live in a moment when half the country would be perfectly content to forget somebody like Nina Simone,” Pendleton says. “What a precarious state; what a precarious place to be culturally, historically.”The artists have an important partner in Brent Leggs, the executive director of the National Trust’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund. Launched in 2017, the action fund aims to identify and preserve what Leggs calls “nationally significant projects that express the Black experience.” Leggs, 49, saw in the modest clapboard home the very qualities that make many historical Black American sites so necessary — and so vulnerable to loss. “I was inspired by the simplicity of this unadorned vernacular structure that at first glance might appear to be missing history and meaning,” he says. “I believe deeply that places like the Nina Simone childhood home deserve the same stewardship and admiration as Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello or George Vanderbilt’s Biltmore estate.”Eunice Kathleen Waymon, a.k.a. Nina Simone, at age 8, photographed at the Tryon Cemetery in Tryon, N.C.© The Nina Simone Charitable Trust, courtesy of Dr. Crys Armbrust, Nina Simone Project Archive Simone performing at the 1968 Newport Jazz Festival.David Redfern/Redferns, via Getty ImagesNINA SIMONE WAS born Eunice Kathleen Waymon on Feb. 21, 1933, in the 660-square-foot house at 30 East Livingston Street. Simone’s mother was an ordained minister and domestic worker; her father ran his own dry-cleaning business and worked as a handyman. Modest though the home might seem today, back then it embodied the promise of prosperity. The Waymons’ plot of land afforded them room for a vegetable garden. They enjoyed other small luxuries, as well, as described in Nadine Cohodas’s 2010 biography, “Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone”: a stove in two of the three rooms to keep the house warm during cold months and to heat water for bathing; a small pump organ where Eunice picked out her first notes; a swing in the yard; even a tennis court just across the street. The exercise of segregation was more nuanced in Tryon than it was in large metropolitan areas like Charlotte and Atlanta, but it nonetheless exerted itself as a palpable lack. Simone, her parents and her siblings (she was the sixth of eight children) lived in the home until early 1937, when her father suffered an intestinal illness that left him incapacitated for a time. The next several years were itinerant, the family moving to close to half a dozen now-forgotten homes in and around Tryon.Those early years on Livingston Street established Simone’s foundation as an artist. “Everything that happened to me as a child involved music,” Simone wrote in her 1992 autobiography, “I Put a Spell on You.” “It was part of everyday life, as automatic as breathing.” Her mother, Mary Kate, sang church songs to her daughter; her father, John, introduced her to jazz and the blues. By the time Eunice was 4, she was accompanying her mother on piano as she preached Sunday sermons at St. Luke C.M.E. Church.The years that followed were quite literally the stuff of storybooks (two children’s books about Simone’s life have come out in the last five years): Recognized as a prodigy, Eunice studied under a white woman, whom she called Miss Mazzy, who schooled her in Beethoven and Bach; the town rallied around Eunice and raised money to support her education, including time in New York City, at Juilliard; soon thereafter, she faced wrenching rejection from Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute, where she had hoped to continue her studies in classical music; instead, she made a surprising star turn as a lounge singer at an Atlantic City, N.J., nightclub, leading to a recording contract; a string of hits followed for Eunice (now called Nina); then, galvanized by the social and political upheavals of the 1960s, she achieved artistic complexity and individualism through what she would later call “civil rights music.”The artists on the grounds of the property.Nydia BlasLike Du Bois, Simone was an expat: When she died in 2003, after a protracted illness, she was living in Carry-le-Rouet, a small seaside town in the south of France, some 4,500 miles away from the house on East Livingston Street where she had been born 70 years earlier. Even though she lived nearly half her life outside of the United States — from Liberia to the Netherlands and beyond before settling in France — she remained forever enlisted in the cause of racial justice in America. Simone’s enduring power emanates from her art and from her activism, as well as from her activist art. Her biggest hits — “I Loves You, Porgy,” “Trouble in Mind,” “I Put a Spell on You” — are ingenious reinventions of other people’s songs grappling with love, loss and longing. But her most cherished recordings — “Four Women,” “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” “Mississippi Goddam” — are original compositions that give voice to an insurgent Black pride and defiance. It is these qualities, this complexity of vision, to which the four artists respond.“I think the most interesting question is ‘why, why, why?’” Pendleton says. Why Nina? Why now? For him, the answers are clear. “I’m interested in the questions that Nina Simone’s legacy raises. And these are not just questions about music; [they’re] questions about the avant-garde, about abstraction, about how artists speak to each other across generations and across time.” Pendleton, 38, whose work often incorporates language layered like a palimpsest, finds his artistic connection to Simone in a shared commitment to the complexity, at times the indeterminacy, of voice. (Simone once said of her vocal instrument, “Sometimes I sound like gravel and sometimes I sound like coffee and cream.”) Listening to recordings like “Sinnerman” or “Feeling Good” or “Why? (The King of Love Is Dead),” which she performed in the days after Martin Luther King Jr.’s April 1968 assassination, “demands a kind of deep listening, a kind of geometry of attention,” Pendleton explains.It is fitting, if unexpected, that a group of visual artists — not musicians — came together to rescue Simone’s childhood home. They share common goals: that the home be preserved as a place of artistic creation and invention; that it support aspiring artists, particularly those pursuing the path from which Simone was excluded, in classical performance and composition. In the fashion of Simone’s classical compositional approach, the artists offer variations on these shared themes. Pendleton wonders if the home might function like a StoryCorps site, providing a space for oral history and reflection. Mehretu, 51, thinks it could “offer a refuge and a space of development” for creative people. Johnson, perhaps inspired by his travels to Ghana, imagines it as a site of pilgrimage — in both the physical and the virtual worlds. Leggs understands all of these visions and more coming together as part of the enduring legacy of the home, and ensuring that Tryon, as Leggs puts it, “has a Black future.”The language of historical preservation — easements, adaptive reuse, stewardship planning — might not inspire much passion. But in the mouths of Leggs and the four artists, these words become incantations. Collectively, they understand that while Simone’s childhood home is a potent symbol, it is also a century-old structure in need of maintenance and basic upkeep. It’s a contrast worthy of Simone herself, a singer both of show tunes and knife-sharp indictments of racist duplicity, a loving freedom fighter and truculent aggressor, a figure who tests our capacity to contain the challenging but essential facets of our national history. Nearly two decades after her death, she is still bearing witness, living her life after life through the artists she inspires in the house where she was born. More